XML Minifier

XML shows up in plenty of contexts where every byte of transfer size matters more than human readability — a SOAP request body sent repeatedly between services, a configuration value stored in an environment variable with a length limit, a feed fetched frequently by automated clients. Collapsing the whitespace between elements while carefully preserving CDATA sections, comments and attribute values exactly as written removes the formatting overhead without touching any of the data those special sections deliberately protect, which is the same safety guarantee the parser applies when formatting in the other direction.

As with the formatter's parsing guarantees, minification here only ever removes whitespace between element tags — it does not reorder elements, rewrite attribute values, or alter anything a program parsing the resulting XML would actually read. A document minified this way and one formatted for readability represent exactly the same data to anything that consumes it programmatically; only their byte size and human legibility differ.

Whitespace between two sibling elements — indentation used purely for a human reader's benefit — is what gets removed. Whitespace that sits directly inside a text-bearing element as actual content, such as a deliberate space within a sentence stored as element text, is preserved rather than stripped, since XML has no general rule that whitespace inside element content is insignificant the way HTML often treats it. Getting this distinction right is part of why a purpose-built parser handles it correctly where a blanket "remove all whitespace" approach would corrupt genuine text content.