When I've looked into this kind of thing before, the answer was "don't even try to format your XML. Use a specialized editor to view it."

But now I have a good reason. I want to change one value in an XML file, but not confuse the version control system. When I look at the deltas in git, I want to clearly see that one value changed, not have it tell me that the whole file is totally different, or that the file only has one (enormously long) line.

I'm only changing one value in an XML file that I normally just read, and that's created by the user in-person. So is there some kind of filter approach that will let me update one value while preserving everything, even whitespace, in the file otherwise?

—John

In reply to Updating XML while preserving formatting by John M. Dlugosz

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