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indenting XML in vim

Sometimes I need to look inside XML files which consist of one big line. It’s very impossible, and reformatting takes a time. Fortunately, I’ve found a good solution for vim.

I added to my “.vimrc” file:

map <F2> <Esc>:1,$!xmllint --format -<CR>

Now I can press “F2” button, and vim indents the text.

More hints on indenting XML in vim: Tip #349: Format your xml document using xmllint.

This entry was posted by olpa on Wednesday, June 15th, 2005 at 1:55 pm and is filed under vim. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

18 Responses to “indenting XML in vim”

  1. Rick Says:
    May 8th, 2008 at 5:58 pm

    Thanks. Quick hit on google and did what I needed.

  2. Lynn Says:
    November 4th, 2008 at 7:51 pm

    Thanks, this works great on both linux and mac…

  3. mustafa Says:
    February 24th, 2009 at 5:45 pm

    Thanx for the tip. really useful.

  4. Johan Says:
    March 9th, 2009 at 7:35 pm

    Great! This was just what I needed, and with libxml2 from http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32/ it works fine on Windows too.

  5. pzy Says:
    March 12th, 2009 at 9:13 am

    It works great! Thanks.

  6. Sean Says:
    May 19th, 2009 at 1:13 pm

    Great tip, thanks for that :)

  7. Luke Says:
    June 26th, 2009 at 7:03 pm

    Great, thanks!

  8. Nachiket Says:
    July 31st, 2009 at 9:12 pm

    Excellent..thanks!

  9. Angelo Says:
    August 4th, 2009 at 11:39 am

    cool, thanks

  10. Jan Wegner Says:
    October 21st, 2009 at 9:53 am

    Hi, plain great
    but what about errors (e.g. not wellformed, or extra chars …).
    When they occur. The buffer is overwritten w/ the
    errormessage and the original buffercontent is lost
    Or do I miss something.

    Cheers, Jan

  11. olpa Says:
    October 22nd, 2009 at 7:04 am

    Yes, xml shouldn’t contain errors, otherwise no tool can re-format the document.

  12. Serdar Says:
    January 6th, 2010 at 10:35 am

    You can use eclipse and wtp plugin to re-format xml if it is not well formed.

  13. Praveen Says:
    October 13th, 2010 at 5:05 am

    Great, Thanks

  14. RazzleGames Says:
    May 18th, 2011 at 3:36 am

    Thanks, very Nice! We can do anything with vim!

  15. mvkbabu Says:
    December 21st, 2011 at 10:17 pm

    awesome, 1st hit and found the answer !

  16. Marek Says:
    April 20th, 2012 at 12:00 pm

    Thanks! First hit and very helpful

  17. Matt Says:
    August 22nd, 2012 at 8:44 pm

    Thx!

  18. Tom Haines Says:
    August 31st, 2012 at 5:41 pm

    Wow….just…wow.

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