I have a project with huge XML files that I'm copying and pasting into Emacs to edit. It's all on a single line, so I'd like to have a tool to make one XML element per line. Is there an Emacs function that I can use? I guess I'll even settle for a command-line tool that nicely integrates with Emacs, but that's not ideal.
+5
A:
The feature you are looking for is typically called "pretty print". There is a pretty-print function for emacs at:
http://sinewalker.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/pretty-printing-xml-with-emacs-nxml-mode/
Also, take a look at this SO question which has other options.
Anthony
2010-02-01 23:07:04
What could also be done is passing it through xmllint (part of the libxml2 package).
amphetamachine
2010-02-01 23:14:51
Do you happen to know what notepad++ uses? I am pretty sure it is a library and not a simple function.
Anthony
2010-02-01 23:19:50
Yes, "pretty print" was the term I needed to find that post. However, it took about half a minute for nXml mode to "parse" my doc before it even started the indenting and other stuff. Can I turn that off? xml-mode works much faster for me.
User1
2010-02-01 23:19:56
nXml used to really choke on single-line XML files; one of the reasons I stopped using it by default years ago.
Joe Casadonte
2010-02-02 13:39:17
+1
A:
I've used xml-parse for years to reformat XML. The specific command you want in that package is xml-reformat-tags. Hope that helps!
Joe Casadonte
2010-02-02 13:57:12
+1
A:
I wrote a little Elisp function for that, that relies on xmllint from libxml:
(defun format-xml ()
(interactive)
(shell-command-on-region 1 (point-max) "xmllint --format -" (current-buffer) t)
)
kovan
2010-02-10 20:57:47