Here is a simple JAVA program for Indenting / Formatting a long XML string. You can provide a XML as a string OR can provide XML from a file according to your requirement.
Formatting an XML can be useful for reading or just simply pretty printing it.
Here is a complete tested code you can directly run the program and see the output.
/* IndentXML.java */
import java.io.ByteArrayInputStream;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.OutputStream;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException;
import javax.xml.transform.OutputKeys;
import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerException;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.dom.DOMSource;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
public class IndentXML {
public static void main(String[] args) throws ParserConfigurationException, SAXException, IOException, TransformerException
{
//get the factory
DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
//Using factory get an instance of document builder
DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
//providing XML string to be indented
String xmlStringToIndent = "<AllEmployee><Employee><Name>Ram</Name><Designation>Programmer</Designation><Department>Development</Department></Employee><Employee><Name>Shyam</Name><Designation>TL</Designation><Department>Finanace</Department></Employee><Employee><Name>Geeta</Name><Designation>Manager</Designation><Department>HR</Department></Employee></AllEmployee>";
//converting String to InputStream
InputStream inStr = new ByteArrayInputStream(xmlStringToIndent.getBytes());
Document doc = db.parse(inStr);
//Output file
File outputFile = new File("c:/indentedOutputXmlFile.xml");
OutputStream outSrc = new FileOutputStream(outputFile);
//creating a transformer
TransformerFactory transFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
Transformer transformer = transFactory.newTransformer();
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.ENCODING, "utf-8");
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.OMIT_XML_DECLARATION, "no");
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
transformer.setOutputProperty("{http://xml.apache.org/xslt}indent-amount", "5");
transformer.transform(new DOMSource(doc), new StreamResult(outSrc));
System.out.println("OutputFile created sucessfully!! "+outputFile.getPath());
}
}
Input XML
String xmlStringToIndent = "<AllEmployee><Employee><Name>Ram</Name><Designation>Programmer</Designation><Department>Development</Department></Employee><Employee><Name>Shyam</Name><Designation>TL</Designation><Department>Finanace</Department></Employee><Employee><Name>Geeta</Name><Designation>Manager</Designation><Department>HR</Department></Employee></AllEmployee>";
Output XML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?>
<AllEmployee>
<Employee>
<Name>Ram</Name>
<Designation>Programmer</Designation>
<Department>Development</Department>
</Employee>
<Employee>
<Name>Shyam</Name>
<Designation>TL</Designation>
<Department>Finanace</Department>
</Employee>
<Employee>
<Name>Geeta</Name>
<Designation>Manager</Designation>
<Department>HR</Department>
</Employee>
</AllEmployee>
Note :
If you are passing XML string and it contains double quotes ("). Make to to bypass it by adding backward slash (\").
I observer below mentioned error when the string contained space in the beginning as show below.
String xmlStringToIndent = " <AllEmployee><Employee><Name>Ram</Name><Designation>Programmer ....."
Note the space in the beginning of the string. Make sure your XML is formatted properly.
Error
[Fatal Error] :1:7: The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed.
Exception in thread "main" org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed.
at org.apache.xerces.parsers.DOMParser.parse(Unknown Source)
at org.apache.xerces.jaxp.DocumentBuilderImpl.parse(Unknown Source)
at javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder.parse(DocumentBuilder.java:124)
at com.hewitt.hre.fadv.IndentXML.main(IndentXML.java:43)
