How to open an XML file ?
XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. It defines the format of data and it is similar to HTML as both are markup languages but while HTML has a predefined set of standard tags, XML has user-defined tags, although has a starting standard tag:
<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”UTF-8”?>
XML is a lot closer to JSON than HTML because it provides a conventional format of data transmission.
There are 4 ways of opening an XML file:
- Using a text editor
- Using a browser
- Using an XML Viewer
- Using Excel
We will explore all these methods, along with their implementations in a step-wise manner.
Method 1: Using a text editor
if you want to open your XML file outside your browser/offline, you can use either of the following editors:
- Notepad
- Notepad++
- Sublime Text
- VSCode
- WordPad
Here, VSCode and Sublime Text editors are used to open and edit heavy XML files.
Steps for opening the XML file:
-
Step 1: Right-click the XML file and select “Open With.”
-
Step 2: Select “Notepad” from the given options that drop down upon clicking “Open with”.
-
Step 3: Now you can open the file the XML file in Notepad.
Method 2: Using a browser Almost every browser can be used to open an XML file. To open the XML file in Google Chrome, follow the below steps:
-
Step 1:Right-click the XML file and select “Open With.”
-
Step 2: Select “Google Chrome” from the given options that drop down upon clicking “Open with”.
-
Step 3: Now you can open the file the XML file in Google Chrome. You can use either of the browsers to open the XML file.
Method 3:Using an XML Viewer, if you want to open your XML file inside your browser/online, you can use the following sites:
- Code Beautify
- JSON Formatter
- XML Explorer
Here, you can either upload the XML file or directly copy and paste the contents of the file.
Steps for modifying the XML file:
-
Step 1: Open the webpage of Code Beautify and click on XML viewer.
-
Step 2: Upload the file or copy-paste it.
-
Step 3: You can use Tree View to improve the ways to view the hierarchy of the content.
Method 4: Using Excel It is not suitable to use Excel when there are numerous tags in the XML file.
-
Step 1: Open MS-Excel and click on the “File” button.
-
Step 2: Now go to the option “Open” and upon clicking on it you will encounter a few other options, select the option “Browse”.
-
Step 3: Upon clicking “Browse”, a tab will open from which select the XML file and click on “Open”.