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Application to quickly view a large XML file?

We have a 120MB XML file that we want to view. Opening it in IE brings my machine to a workaround. I think IE loads the whole file into memory.

Is there a tool to view this faster? Ideally, this is a Windows GUI based tool. It would be nice if you could drill through the data without collapsing / breaking the elements.

The text pane works, but the data is not hierarchically formatted. Ie: displays data as:

<TagA><TagB id="a"><TagC>abc</TagC></TagB></TagA>

instead:

<TagA>
      <TagB id="a">
            <TagC>abc</TagC>
      </TagB>
</TagA>
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You say you are already using TextPad, so there is a plugin for Textpad called XmlTidy that reformats the XML indented. Very comfortably. You can find it on the Text Panel Extensions page .



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To view the XML file, I would use less (1) , although it does not format anything (other than breaking the page entry). If you want hiliting syntax, try vim .



Apparently you want to view it in a fairly printed form. To do this, I suggest using a separate prefeather as a filter and reducing its output. HTML Tidy can do pretty printable XML printing. In other words, a simple pipeline will work; for vim you need to tidy up in a separate file (which you can also view with notepad as well).

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I know this might sound a little cheesy, but I've used Notepad ++ for times when I just needed a quick and dirty way to view huge XML files.

Its main advantage is that it is just lightweight, basically being just a fancy version of a notepad with a few extra features:

  • Syntax highlighting, indentation, etc. for a whole bunch of file types including xml
  • Multi-window
  • Find / Replace Regexp
  • A bunch of more stuff (like macros) that you probably will never use.
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If you've already installed it, Visual Studio works great for viewing XML documents.
Editing> Advanced> Format Document will reformat the document layout to make it easier to read (good for the XML you get as one line).
Going to the Edit> Advanced> Outlining> Toggle All Outlining menu item can crash all of your nodes to help drill the sections you need.
If you haven't downloaded it yet, you're not sure if it's really worth downloading.

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To view the XML document faster, use UltraEdit or Microsoft Visual Studio IDE.

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I have used the free EditPad Lite successfully (e.g. opening a StackOverflow db dump (> 1GB file).

It opens the file instantly.

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XMLMax will load your 120Mb xml as a syntax tree in less than 5 seconds. you can collapse, expand and more with any xml size. google xmlmax editor.

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