XML Tidy

A very simple tool written in C Sharp to properly format XML files.

Motivation

In the recent past I have been working with some large XML files that come to me as a single line of XML output. There are times when I need to open one of these files in an editor for reading, particularly when I am doing a development task. This tool stems from the need to format these XML files into a human-readable output.

There probably are other tools out there that achieve the same result, but it's always more fun to write your own.

Requirements

There are two main requirements for this tool to work:

Mono.Options - Find more about it here and here.
- What I have been doing is to compile the sources for Mono.Options on the target platform (.Net 4 or Mono 2.6.7) and copying the respective assemblies to a dotnet or mono folder respectively. The build scripts use those folders to build XmlTidy.
LINQ to XML - Or more precisely, the System.Xml.Linq namespace.

How it Works

After you compile the source, working with XmlTidy is as simple as making the following call on the command line:

xmltidy myxmlfile.xml

Command Line Options

C:\>xmltidy.exe -?

Usage: xmltidy.exe [OPTIONS]* [FILENAME]+
Properly formats and indents a valid XML file. At least one
valid xml file name is expected. No options are required.

Options:
  -?, -h, --help             Show this help message and exit.
  -V, --version              Show version information and exit.
  -v, --verbose              Increase message verbosity.
  -b, --backup               Make a copy of input before tidying it.

Further Information

I wrote a blog post about XmlTidy and you can read it here. The post goes into how XmlTidy works internally. You can run the rss and atom feed files under the samples folder through XmlTidy to see the results. Right after you run the build script, here is a how you can test it:

.\bin\xmltidy.exe -v -b .\samples\blog.theblinkingcursor.org.atom.xml .\samples\esr.ibiblio.org.rss.xml