Question

I’ve been having problems with the indentation of my XML files. Everytime I load them from a certain server, the XML nodes all jumble up on a few lines. I want to write a quick application to indent the nodes properly. That is:

<name>Bob<name>
<age>24</age>
<address>
  <stnum>2</stnum>
  <street>herp derp st</street>
</address>

currently it’s coming out as :

<name>bob</name><age>24</age>
<address>
      <stnum>2</stnum><street>herp derp st</street>
</address>

since I can’t touch the internal program that gives me these xml files and re-indenting them without a program would take ages, I wanted to write up a quick program to do this for me. When I use the XMLdocument library stuff, it only reads the information of the nodes. So my question is, whats a good way to read the file, line by line and then reindenting it for me. All xml nodes are the same.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use the XmlTextWritter class. More specifically the .Formatting = Formatting.Indented.

Here is some sample code I found on this blog post.
http://www.yetanotherchris.me/home/2009/9/9/formatting-xml-in-c.html

public static string FormatXml(string inputXml)
{
    XmlDocument document = new XmlDocument();
    document.Load(new StringReader(inputXml));

    StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
    using (XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(new StringWriter(builder)))
    {
        writer.Formatting = Formatting.Indented;
        document.Save(writer);
    }

    return builder.ToString();
}