Free tools for working with XML

Microsoft has another XML tool that I find valuable: Internet Explorer Tools for Validating XML and Viewing XSLT Output, found at the unwieldy URL
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d23c1d2c-1571-4d61-bda8-adf9f6849df9&displaylang=en

This tool allow you you to validate XML and view the result of an XSLT transform triggered by an processing directive. The only problem with this tool is that Microsoft has not updated it to support MSXML 4.0. Although, the scripts are given in the download and can easily be hacked to accommodate MSXML 4.0 with a few changes.

I believed I only changed the line in the msxmlval.htm file from:

var vdoc = xmldoc.cloneNode(false);

to the following lines so it would support MSXML 4.0:

var vdoc = null;

try
{
vdoc = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument.4.0");
}
catch(e)
{
vdoc = null;
}

if (vdoc == null)
{
vdoc = xmldoc.cloneNode(false);
}

You need to make this change before installing the *.inf files per the readme.txt file.

XmlStarlet http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/

XMLStarlet is a set of command line utilities (tools) which can be used to transform, query, validate, and edit XML documents and files using simple set of shell commands in similar way it is done for plain text files using UNIX grep, sed, awk, diff, patch, join, etc commands.

The toolkit's feature set includes options to:

Check or validate XML files (simple well-formedness check, DTD, XSD, RelaxNG)

Calculate values of XPath expressions on XML files (such as running sums, etc)

Search XML files for matches to given XPath expressions

Apply XSLT stylesheets to XML documents (including EXSLT support, and passing parameters to stylesheets)

Query XML documents (ex. query for value of some elements of attributes, sorting, etc)

Modify or edit XML documents (ex. delete some elements)

Format or "beautify" XML documents (as changing indentation, etc)

Fetch XML documents using http:// or ftp:// URLs

Browse tree structure of XML documents (in similar way to 'ls' command for directories)

Include one XML document into another using XInclude

XML c14n canonicalization

Escape/unescape special XML characters in input text

Print directory as XML document

Convert XML into PYX format (based on ESIS - ISO 8879), and vice versa

It's open source and free.
Download it from http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/