xml-canonic

Produce canonical XML form

TLDR

Canonicalize XML (W3C C14N)

$ xml canonic [file.xml]

Exclusive canonicalization

$ xml canonic --exc-c14n [file.xml]

Canonicalize without comments

$ xml canonic --without-comments [file.xml]

Read from stdin

$ cat file.xml | xml canonic

SYNOPSIS

xml canonic [options] [file]

xml canonic produces a canonical XML form of the input document as defined by the W3C XML Canonicalization (C14N) specification. Canonicalization normalizes whitespace, attribute order, namespace declarations, and character encoding so that two logically equivalent documents produce identical byte streams.It is part of the xmlstarlet command-line XML toolkit. Canonical XML is commonly used as a preparation step before computing cryptographic digests for XML digital signatures (XML-DSig), and for reliable document comparison.

PARAMETERS

--exc-c14n

Use Exclusive XML Canonicalization (EXC-C14N) instead of the default Canonical XML 1.0.

--without-comments

Omit comments from canonical output.

INSTALL

sudo dnf install xmlstarlet

sudo pacman -S xmlstarlet

sudo apk add xmlstarlet

sudo zypper install xmlstarlet

brew install xmlstarlet

nix profile install nixpkgs#xmlstarlet

CAVEATS

Canonicalization is lossy: comments may be stripped, whitespace normalized, and namespace declarations rewritten. Non-canonical formatting differences are intentionally erased. Cryptographic signatures over canonicalized XML require both parties to use the same C14N variant.