XML Tree Viewer
Explore a document as a collapsible tree with attribute badges and click-to-copy XPath for any node.
What is XML Tree Viewer?
A structural view of an XML document. It shows the tree the parser built — elements, text, CDATA, comments and processing instructions as distinct node types — rather than the text, which is the faster way to answer 'where is that value?'
How it works
Every node from the parse is rendered with its depth, name, namespace prefix and attributes; children collapse individually, with counts on the collapsed rows. The XPath for a node is generated as you point at it, indexed with a predicate only where a name is ambiguous at that level — so `/orders/order/line[2]` appears when there really are several `line` children, and not otherwise.
- Paste the document. Drop in XML, a schema, a feed or an XPath expression. Everything is parsed in the page: no upload, no server round trip, and the tools keep working with the network switched off.
- Set the options that match your document. Indent unit, whether to keep comments, which dialect, which output method. The defaults are the safe ones — nothing that changes meaning is enabled for you.
- Read the result, then copy or download it. Results appear as you type, copy straight to the clipboard, and download with a sensible filename (.xml, .xsd, .csv). Reset returns every field to its default.
Examples
A minified document from an API response
Paste one line of XML and the Formatter indents it, wraps long start tags one attribute per line and normalises empty elements — without touching text inside mixed content.
An XPath that works in Chrome and not in your servlet
The XPath Tester evaluates against a real tree and reports the axis or function it cannot support, instead of returning zero nodes and letting you guess why.
A document that will not parse
The Validator gives line and column for every mismatched tag, stray ampersand and duplicate attribute, with the reason in words: which open element was expected, which was found.
A schema that only half matches your data
The XSD Validator marks each violation with the path of the offending node, and the Schema Generator goes the other way — inferring a starting-point XSD from real documents.
Common mistakes
Assuming a pretty-printer cannot change meaning
Whitespace between elements is often insignificant, but inside mixed content it is not: `<p>Hello <b>world</b></p>` must stay on one line. Formatting here re-indents element-only content and leaves mixed content alone.
Treating a validation pass as proof of interoperability
The DTD and XSD validators implement honest subsets. A document reported valid here can still be rejected by a full validator that understands identity constraints, substitution groups or XSD 1.1 assertions — each page lists what it does not cover.
Reading the whole document because the parser did
A DOCTYPE is not inert. If your parser resolves external entities, pasting an untrusted document is enough to read a file or call an internal URL. The XXE Risk Checker shows what a document asks for; the fix is in the parser configuration.
Forgetting that attributes and elements are not interchangeable
`<id>1</id>` and `id="1"` mean different things to every schema and every XPath. When converting to CSV or YAML the distinction is preserved (`@id`), because flattening it away is the change that costs an afternoon later.
Frequently asked questions
How is the generated XPath built?
From the node's ancestors, using the element names as they appear in the document. A positional predicate is added only when the parent has more than one child with that name, which keeps the path short and stable — and it is evaluated against the same tree, so the XPath Tester should return it as the single match.
Why does the tree show whitespace nodes?
Because they exist. Whether a text node of spaces matters depends on the schema, so the viewer distinguishes whitespace-only text from real text rather than hiding it and making a later XPath behave unexpectedly.
Can it handle documents with namespaces?
Yes, and it keeps prefixes visible, because dropping them is how `/orders/order` silently matches nothing. The Namespace Resolver lists the full prefix-to-URI mapping in scope.