Pretty much every server-side language I’ve worked with has written XML to a file as compressed text. This is of course intentional in that any whitespace is indeed space and through the eyes of a program doesn’t matter. However, through the eyes of a human it does matter because large chunks of compressed xml is rather unreadable.

In the past I’ve always used Notepad++ to quickly format XML. However, this has always required opening the xml file in Notepad++ and formatting there. However, I just found in CF Builder the same feature. To use this you can either right-click anywhere in the editor containing the xml to be formatted and choose ‘Format’, or you can use the keyboard default shortcut “Shift-Command-F” on a mac or “Shift-Ctrl-F” on windows.

While I would recommend maintaining its compressed format in the file, this is a great feature for quickly making compressed XML readable.