This is an example of how to pretty print an xml file in Java. We have implemented a method, that isvoid prettyPrint(Document xml), in order to transform the DOM Document to a formatted xml String. The steps to get an xml file and pretty print it in a String format using the example’s method is described below:

• Obtain a new instance of aDocumentBuilderFactory, that is a factory API that enables applications to obtain a parser that produces DOM object trees from XML documents.
• Set the parser produced so as not to validate documents as they are parsed, usingsetValidating(boolean validating) API method of DocumentBuilderFactory, with validating set to false.
• Create a new instance of aDocumentBuilder, usingnewDocumentBuilder() API method of DocumentBuilderFactory.
• Parse theFileInputStream with the content to be parsed, usingparse(InputStream is) API method of DocumentBuilder. This method parses the content of the given InputStream as an XML document and returns a new DOMDocument object.
• Callvoid prettyPrint(Document xml) method of the example. The method gets the xml Document and prints it after transforming it with specific parameters, such as encoding. The method uses aTransformer, that is created usingnewTransformer() API method ofTransformerFactory. The Transformer is used to transform a source tree into a result tree. After setting specific output properties to the transformer, usingsetOutputProperty(String name, String value) API method of Transformer, the method uses it to make the transformation, withtransform(Source xmlSource, Result outputTarget) API method of Transformer. The parameters are theDOMSource with the DOM node and the result that is aStreamResult created from aStringWriter.

Let’s take a look at the code snippet that follows:  

package com.javacodegeeks.snippets.core;import java.io.File;import java.io.FileInputStream;import java.io.StringWriter;import java.io.Writer;import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;import javax.xml.transform.OutputKeys;import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory;import javax.xml.transform.dom.DOMSource;import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;import org.w3c.dom.Document;public class PrettyPrintXMLInJava {public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();dbf.setValidating(false);DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();Document doc = db.parse(new FileInputStream(new File("in.xml")));prettyPrint(doc);}public static final void prettyPrint(Document xml) throws Exception {Transformer tf = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();tf.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.ENCODING, "UTF-8");tf.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");Writer out = new StringWriter();tf.transform(new DOMSource(xml), new StreamResult(out));System.out.println(out.toString());}}

Input:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0"><channel><title>Java Tutorials and Examples 1</title><language>en-us</language></channel></rss>

Output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?><rss version="2.0"><channel><title>Java Tutorials and Examples 1</title><language>en-us</language></channel></rss>

  
This was an example of how to pretty print an xml file in Java.

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