ppx – Pretty Print XML

Use ppx to pretty print an XML source in human readable form.

ppx file.xml

White Space

For greater readability ppx removes and adds white space.

Warning

White space can be significant in an XML document [1]. So be careful when using ppx to rewrite XML files.

Options

ppx can be used with the following command-line options:

$ ppx --help

usage: ppx [-h] [-V] [-n] [-o] [xml_source [xml_source ...]]

Pretty Print XML source in human readable form.

positional arguments:
  xml_source            XML source (file, <stdin>, http://...)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -V, --version         show program's version number and exit
  -n, --no-syntax       no syntax highlighting
  -o, --omit-declaration
                        omit the XML declaration

Syntax Highlighting

ppx will syntax highlight the XML source if you have Pygments installed.

Pretty print the XML Schema 1.0 schema document:

ppx http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema.xsd

-n, --no-syntax

You can disable syntax highlighting with the --no-syntax option.

XML declaration

XML documents should begin with an XML declaration which specifies the version of XML being used [2].

By default ppx will print an (UTF-8) XML declaration.

-o, --omit-declaration

Omit the XML declaration with the --omit-declaration option.

ppx --omit-declaration file.xml

Examples

Pretty print any local XML file:

ppx data_dump.xml

RSS feed:

ppx http://feeds.feedburner.com/PythonInsider

Page XML file with less:

ppx xml/large.xml | less -RX

Redirect output (pipe) to ppx:

curl -s https://www.python.org/dev/peps/peps.rss/ | ppx

Rewrite XML:

ppx -n data_dump.xml > pp_data_dump.xml

Footnotes

[1]	Extensible Markup Language §2.10 White Space Handling

[2]	Extensible Markup Language §2.8 Prolog and Document Type Declaration