Sample XML File Download

Which Sample XML File Should You Use?

How to Download, Inspect, and Validate an XML Test File

The examples below use xmllint, which ships with libxml2 (preinstalled on macOS and most Linux distributions), plus Python and JavaScript. The output shown is what you get with the files on this page.

Step 1: Download the file

Click Download file next to any sample above, or fetch it from the command line. Each file has a stable direct URL, so you can also download it in a CI job.

# Download a single file
curl -O https://samples-files.com/samples/code/xml/sample2.xml

# Download the schema and both files that go with it
curl -O https://samples-files.com/samples/code/xml/sample6.xsd \
     -O https://samples-files.com/samples/code/xml/sample6.xml \
     -O https://samples-files.com/samples/code/xml/sample8-schema-invalid.xml

Step 2: Inspect the structure

Open small files in any text editor or IDE. For large files like sample5.xml, look at the first lines first, or pretty-print the file to see how it is nested.

# Peek at the first lines without loading the whole file
head -n 20 sample5.xml

# Pretty-print (indent) the document
xmllint --format sample3.xml

Step 3: Check that it is well-formed

Well-formed XML has one root element, every tag closed and correctly nested, quoted attributes, and escaped special characters such as &. --noout prints nothing when the file is fine and an error with a line number when it is not.

$ xmllint --noout sample2.xml
$ echo $?
0

$ xmllint --noout sample7-malformed.xml
sample7-malformed.xml:6: parser error : xmlParseEntityRef: no name
        <title>Pride & Prejudice</title>
                      ^

Step 4: Validate against an XSD schema

Being well-formed only means the syntax is correct. To check that the data has the right elements, attributes, and types, validate the file against a schema. Download sample6.xsd and run:

$ xmllint --noout --schema sample6.xsd sample6.xml
sample6.xml validates

$ xmllint --noout --schema sample6.xsd sample8-schema-invalid.xml
Element 'purchaseOrder': The attribute 'orderId' is required but missing.
Element 'orderDate': '15/01/2026' is not a valid value of the atomic type 'xs:date'.
Element 'quantity': '0' is not a valid value of the atomic type 'xs:positiveInteger'.
Element 'price': 'nineteen' is not a valid value of the atomic type 'xs:decimal'.
Element 'color': This element is not expected.
sample8-schema-invalid.xml fails to validate

Step 5: Parse it in your code

Python's standard library can parse all of these files. Note the namespace map for sample4.xml: without it, find() returns nothing, which is one of the most common XML bugs.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

# 1. Simple file: read child elements
tree = ET.parse("sample2.xml")
for book in tree.getroot().findall("book"):
    print(book.findtext("title"), "-", book.findtext("price"))

# 2. Namespaced file: map prefixes to namespace URIs
ns = {"ord": "https://samples-files.com/ns/orders"}
root = ET.parse("sample4.xml").getroot()
for item in root.iterfind(".//ord:Item", ns):
    print(item.get("sku"), item.findtext("ord:Description", namespaces=ns))

# 3. Malformed file: make sure your code fails gracefully
try:
    ET.parse("sample7-malformed.xml")
except ET.ParseError as e:
    print("Invalid XML:", e)  # not well-formed (invalid token): line 6, column 22

For large files, use a streaming parser so memory use stays flat:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

# Stream the 1.4 MB catalog instead of loading it all into memory
count = 0
for event, elem in ET.iterparse("sample5.xml", events=("end",)):
    if elem.tag == "product":
        count += 1
        elem.clear()  # free memory as you go
print(count, "products")  # 2000 products

In the browser, use the built-in DOMParser:

// Run in the browser console on this page
const res = await fetch("/samples/code/xml/sample3.xml");
const doc = new DOMParser().parseFromString(await res.text(), "application/xml");

if (doc.querySelector("parsererror")) {
  throw new Error("Invalid XML");
}

doc.querySelectorAll("employee").forEach((e) => {
  console.log(e.getAttribute("id"), e.querySelector("name").textContent);
});