Uses the lxml and etree packages to pretty print an XML file passed in as an argument. For example: % python prettyprintxml.py myxmlfile.xml

prettyprintxml.py

from lxml import etree
import sys

def indent(elem, level=0):
    i = "\n" + level*"  "
    if len(elem):
        if not elem.text or not elem.text.strip():
            elem.text = i + "  "
        for e in elem:
            indent(e, level+1)
            if not e.tail or not e.tail.strip():
                e.tail = i + "  "
        if not e.tail or not e.tail.strip():
            e.tail = i
    else:
        if level and (not elem.tail or not elem.tail.strip()):
            elem.tail = i

if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    src = sys.argv[1]
else:
    src = sys.stdin

tree = etree.parse(src)
indent(tree.getroot())
tree.write("prettyprint.xml", "utf-8")
print "Finished formatting %s to prettyprint.xml." % src