What is the simplest way to get indented XML with

Question

When I build XML up from scratch with XmlDocument, the OuterXml property already has everything nicely indented with line breaks. However, if I call LoadXml on some very "compressed" XML (no line breaks or indention) then the output of OuterXml stays that way. So ...

What is the simplest way to get beautified XML output from an instance of XmlDocument?

Answer 1

    public static string FormatXml(string xml)
    {
        try
        {
            var doc = XDocument.Parse(xml);
            return doc.ToString();
        }
        catch (Exception)
        {
            return xml;
        }
    }

Answer 2

A more simplified approach based on the accepted answer:

static public string Beautify(this XmlDocument doc) {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    XmlWriterSettings settings = new XmlWriterSettings
    {
        Indent = true
    };

    using (XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(sb, settings)) {
        doc.Save(writer);
    }

    return sb.ToString(); 
}

Setting the new line is not necessary. Indent characters also has the default two spaces so I preferred not to set it as well.

Answer 3

If you have a string of XML, rather than a doc ready for use, you can do it this way:

var xmlString = "<xml>...</xml>"; // Your original XML string that needs indenting.
xmlString = this.PrettifyXml(xmlString);

private string PrettifyXml(string xmlString)
{
    var prettyXmlString = new StringBuilder();

    var xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
    xmlDoc.LoadXml(xmlString);

    var xmlSettings = new XmlWriterSettings()
    {
        Indent = true,
        IndentChars = " ",
        NewLineChars = "\r\n",
        NewLineHandling = NewLineHandling.Replace
    };

    using (XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(prettyXmlString, xmlSettings))
    {
        xmlDoc.Save(writer);
    }

    return prettyXmlString.ToString();
}

Answer 4

Based on the other answers, I looked into XmlTextWriter and came up with the following helper method:

static public string Beautify(this XmlDocument doc)
{
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    XmlWriterSettings settings = new XmlWriterSettings
    {
        Indent = true,
        IndentChars = "  ",
        NewLineChars = "\r\n",
        NewLineHandling = NewLineHandling.Replace
    };
    using (XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(sb, settings)) {
        doc.Save(writer);
    }
    return sb.ToString();
}

It's a bit more code than I hoped for, but it works just peachy.

Answer 5

A shorter extension method version

public static string ToIndentedString( this XmlDocument doc )
{
    var stringWriter = new StringWriter(new StringBuilder());
    var xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(stringWriter) {Formatting = Formatting.Indented};
    doc.Save( xmlTextWriter );
    return stringWriter.ToString();
}