Eclipse XML formatter

Question

Does anyone know of a free alternative to the built in Eclipse XML editor?

The one that is packaged with the IDE has 2 major problems with formatting that my team and I have discovered when formatting:

• The formatter tries to parse escaped char's as though they were unescaped. e.g. ' & l t ;' is treated like '<' which causes the formatter to "stop" (note there isn't really white space between the chars)
• White space between elements is not honored. ex:

<foo> text </foo>

will be formatted to:

<foo>text</foo>

We are using Eclipse 3.4

Thanks in advance.

[[EDIT #1: Issue #1 is a known bug found here: Formatting issues with entities in XML files]]

[[EDIT #2: Apparently the white space formatting is intended functionality. See here. I have requested this be provided as an option or advise on fixing this in a plugin of my own, but as of yet, no answer.]]

Answer 1

I like Notepad++ with the XML Tools plugin. It does XSLT, has an XPATH expression evaluator, and does DTD and schema validation. Toolchain download links:

• Notepad++: http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=95717&amp;use_mirror=internap&amp;filename=npp.5.0.Installer.exe&amp;24657954
• XML Plugins: http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=189927&amp;use_mirror=voxel&amp;filename=xmltools_2.3.1_r639.zip&amp;44936797
• External Libraries: http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=189927&amp;use_mirror=internap&amp;filename=ext_libs.zip&amp;52274848

Answer 2

I have used XMLBuddy in the past http://www.xmlbuddy.com/

before I reverted to OxygenXML but you have to pay for Oxygen.

Answer 3

This is way less than ideal, and I hope someone has a better solution, but it works:

Build a simple App using dom4j:

public static void main( final String[] args ) throws Exception {
 String text = FileUtils.readFileToString( new File( args[ 0 ] ) );
 OutputFormat format = OutputFormat.createPrettyPrint();
 format.setTrimText( false );

 XMLWriter writer = new XMLWriter( System.out, format );
 writer.write( DocumentHelper.parseText( text ) );
}

Create a runnable jar, (optional) batch script, and add as an external tool. Of course, you could try XMLTidy or some other command line XML formatter, but I have had better results with dom4j.

Answer 4

Hi! You can try this one if you like... http://editorxml.sourceforge.net/

Best Regards