import xml.dom.minidom import lxml.etree as etree import sys xml_fname=sys.argv[1] #xml = xml.dom.minidom.parse(xml_fname) # or xml.dom.minidom.parseString(xml_string) #pretty_xml_as_string = xml.toprettyxml() #print pretty_xml_as_string x = etree.parse(xml_fname) print etree.tostring(x, pretty_print = True)