Getting Started with XML

Estimated study time: 9 minutes.

Getting started with XML requires no special software — a plain text editor is enough to write your first document. Here's a simple path to your first working file.

Step 1: Understand the Structure

Every XML document has exactly one root element that contains all other elements, nested as needed.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<course>
  <title>Data Analytics</title>
  <duration>4 Months</duration>
</course>

Step 2: Write Your First File

Save the snippet above as course.xml. Any modern browser can open and display it, or you can view it in a plain text editor.

Step 3: Add Nested Data

<course>
  <title>Data Analytics</title>
  <modules>
    <module>Excel Basics</module>
    <module>SQL for Analysis</module>
    <module>Python for Data</module>
  </modules>
</course>

Tools Worth Knowing

• A code editor with XML syntax highlighting (VS Code, Sublime Text)
• An online XML validator to catch structural errors
• A parsing library in your language of choice (e.g. xml.etree.ElementTree in Python)