commandliners

Sometimes, when I have to program a web service client I have to deal with unformatted XML files. For example, the next one:

<users><user><email>pfortuny@commandliners.com</email><passwd>a0f901492d89fe2ba88cc96bf9d
2475e</passwd></user><user><email>n0str0m0@commandliners.com</email><passwd>7e1b6dbfa824d
5d114e96981cededd00</passwd></user><user><email>rafacas@commandliners.com</email><passwd>
70c1db56f301c9e337b0099bd4174b28</passwd></user></users>

This is not a bad thing, because it is sent that way to save traffic, but I’d rather see it in a human readable format. So I use the xmllint command, that reformat and reindent the input.

$ xmllint --format test.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<users>
  <user>
    <email>pfortuny@commandliners.com</email>
    <passwd>a0f901492d89fe2ba88cc96bf9d2475e</passwd>
  </user>
  <user>
    <email>n0str0m0@commandliners.com</email>
    <passwd>7e1b6dbfa824d5d114e96981cededd00</passwd>
  </user>
  <user>
    <email>rafacas@commandliners.com</email>
    <passwd>70c1db56f301c9e337b0099bd4174b28</passwd>
  </user>
</users> 

The indentation can be controlled by the environment variable XMLLINT_INDENT. The default value is two spaces.

pfortuny, n0str0m0, do not worry guys, those are not your passwords, are they? ;)