Pretty printing xml

A large portion of my day is spent in a command line environment. When inspecting data, I use many different tools to help in this: grep, less, find, sort, cut, etc. If I’m looking at json data, this normally comes from some source that delivers this as a single long string. Python’s json.tool comes to the rescue to convert this wall of text into prettified and human redable data. Here is the example from the docs:

$ echo '{"json":"obj"}' | python -m json.tool

{
    "json": "obj"
}

OK, so that’s great! What if that terrible day arrives and you want to look at unformatted xml data in a command line environment? You could just use xmllint, but that would just be too easy and remove the reason for writing this post.

$ echo '<data><country name="Liechtenstein"><rank>1</rank><year>2008</year><gdppc>141100</gdppc><neighbor name="Austria" direction="E"/><neighbor name="Switzerland" direction="W"/></country></data>' \
| python -c "import sys; from xml.dom import minidom; print minidom.parseString(sys.stdin.read()).toprettyxml()"

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<data>
    <country name="Liechtenstein">
        <rank>1</rank>
        <year>2008</year>
        <gdppc>141100</gdppc>
        <neighbor direction="E" name="Austria"/>
        <neighbor direction="W" name="Switzerland"/>
    </country>
</data>

Huzzah! It works! While this quick snippet was fun to write, I’ll probably never use it.

From The Zen of Python:

	Simple is better than complex
	There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

In this case, I’d argue for the simple and obvious choice of not using python for this task.