A while ago I blogged about an XML Beautifier Tool which is able to tokenize an XML string and output it in human readable format. Strangely enough I noticed that I get quite a few pageviews from people searching for such a tool. Though this tool may be useful to a lot of people I think it is flawed and has serious issues with formatting, speed and memory consumption.

This inspired me to write a new version of XML formatter. It’s based on a SAX parser which is kind of “ugly” to implement and build around but because of it’s event based nature it’s super fast and has a very low memory footprint. The new version of the formatter shouldn’t peak higher in memory than 200 - 300kb even when the XML files start to weight over a megabyte. It also should not have any problems with indentation because it no longer tries to tokenize the XML itself and uses libxml to do the job. I also tried to make the tool documented and extendable.

It’s usage is really simple. All you have to do is initialize an object of XML_Formatter by passing an xml input stream, xml output stream and an array of options and call the format method. You might wonder why it requests input and output streams instead of a file name or a string. It does that to avoid high memory consumption. Here’s an example of how one might use XML_Formatter:

require('XMLFormatter.php');
$input = fopen("input.xml", "r");
$output = fopen("output.xml", "w+");
try {
    $formatter = new XML_Formatter($input, $output);
    $formatter->format();
    echo "Success!";
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo $e->getMessage(), "\n";
}

Nevertheless this tool is quite powerful in what it can do  (I was able to format other website’s XHTML or tidied HTML sources) it also has some problems which are not actually related to the formatter but may seem odd to the user. The PHP xml parser does not understand such entities as   or unsescaped ampersands like in ?x=1&y=1. So it’s the user’s responsibility to provide “correct” XMLs to the formatter.

Other than that I hope it will prove useful to someone. Download the latest version of the XML_Formatter.

beautifier, formatter, PHP, xml Hide