Cristian’s blog

I’ve been using TextWrangler as default text editor in Mac for some time now and today I’ve been confronted with a small problem, I had an xml file that wasn’t formated at all and I wanted a way to easily format the file. Searched in the Text Wrangler menus and didn’t found a tidy option so I googled my problem.

As I expected, I wasn’t the first one to have this problem so I quickly found a solution. And after a minute of work I had my XML file indented and formated as I would.

So … here are the steps I did:

• Go to your TextWrangler’s Unix Filters Folder. You can find it if you go to #! menu, Unix Filters, Open Filters Folder.
• Create a file there, paste the code below

#!/bin/sh
xmllint --c14n "$*" | XMLLINT_INDENT=$'\t' xmllint --format -

• Save the file, give it a meaningful name like “Format XML.sh” or something

And there you have it, now if you go to the #! menu, Unix Filters submenu you will see your Format XML.sh, click it and your xml file will be automatically formated.