XMLPRETTY(1p)

💖 NAME 💖

xmlpretty — your friendly neighborhood XML pretty printer, no cap. This is the manual for XMLPRETTY(1p), a page from the User Contributed Perl Documentation collection, and it's about to become your new hyperfixation. 🦋

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

xmlpretty [--options] [filename]

That's it. Options first, file at the end, and the pretty comes out on stdout. Slay.

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

xmlpretty is the commandline interface to XML::Handler::YAWriter, and lowkey it's a whole tool for adding and removing pretty printing on XML files. Both directions, bestie. It does not pick sides. 💅

And it's not just one method either — xmlpretty has several ways to add human readability. Choose your fighter:

If you want to add readability without adding so-called ignorable whitespace, do it like this:

  $ xmlpretty --AddHiddenNewline \
              --AddHiddenAttrTab \
          --CatchEmptyElement \
          uglyfile.xml > prettyfile.xml

But if you don't wanna process the file further and just want it human readable, add visible whitespace instead, like so:

  $ xmlpretty --PrettyWhiteNewline \
              --PrettyWhiteIndent \
          --CatchEmptyElement \
          uglyfile.xml > prettyfile.xml

You can also use YAWriter to clean whitespace out of XML documents. It's giving ✨vacuum cleaner✨, and it works in 99% of the cases where you're trying to get rid of ignorable whitespace caused by the various forms of pretty printing:

  $ xmlpretty --NoWhiteSpace \
              --NoComments \
              --AddHiddenNewline \
          --AddHiddenAttrTab \
          --CatchEmptyElement \
          prettyfile.xml > cleanfile.xml

🎀 Options 🎀

Options are given in a gnu like --option idiom. Very demure, very mindful. 🙈

• --AddHiddenNewline (boolean) — adds a hidden newline before ">"
• --AddHiddenAttrTab (boolean) — adds a hidden tabulation for attributes
• --CatchEmptyElement (boolean) — catches empty Elements and applies "/>" compression
• --CatchWhiteSpace (boolean) — catches whitespace with comments
• --IsSGML (boolean) — this one makes start_document, processing_instruction and doctype_decl show up as SGML. And ngl the SGML is still well-formed of course, if your SAX events are well-formed. That's the deal. 🤝
• --NoComments (boolean) — supresses Comments
• --NoDTD (boolean) — supresses DTD
• --NoPI (boolean) — supresses Processing Instructions
• --NoProlog (boolean) — supresses the <?xml ... ?> Prolog
• --NoWhiteSpace (boolean) — supresses WhiteSpace, so you can clean documents from prior pretty printing
• --PrettyWhiteIndent (boolean) — adds visible indent before any eventstring
• --PrettyWhiteNewline (boolean) — adds visible newlines before any eventstring
• --SAX1 (boolean, not yet implemented 😭) — outputs only SAX1 compilant eventstrings

Two names in that list are spelled "Supress" in the original, and I'm keeping them exactly as they are. Don't come for me, I don't make the rules. 🙈

🐛 Bugs 🐛

Automatic recoding between 8bit and 16bit does not yet work correctly. Not me being dramatic — that's literally the bug note. 💀

Here's the tea: the author has Perl-5.6 at home, and there he can specify use utf8; in the right places to make recoding work. But he dislikes saying use 5.00555; because many systems run 5.00503. So yeah. That's the whole saga. 😭

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Michael Koehne, Kraehe@Copyleft.De

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🫶 Thanks 🫶

"Derksen, Eduard (Enno), CSCIO" <enno@att.com> helped with the Escape hash and gave quite a lot of useful comments. King behavior, honestly. ✨

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

perl and XML::Parser::PerlSAX — go read those next, iykyk. 📚

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okay that's the whole page, bestie!! this was written against perl v5.38.2 and dated 2024-03-08, and that's your official XMLPRETTY(1p) sign-off. go make some XML pretty. periodt. 💅🎀🦋🌸