XMLStarlet


XMLStarlet is a set of command line utilities to query, transform, validate, and edit XML documents and files using a simple set of shell commands in a way similar to how it is done with UNIX grep, sed, awk, diff, patch, join, etc commands.
This set of command line utilities can be used by those who want to test XPath query or execute commands on the fly as well as deal with many XML documents or for automated XML processing with shell scripts.
WWW Official Site

Features

The toolkit's feature set includes the following options:
  • Check or validate XML files
  • Calculate values of XPath expressions on XML files
  • Search XML files for matches to given XPath expressions
  • Apply XSLT stylesheets to XML documents
  • Query XML documents
  • Modify or edit XML documents
  • Format or "beautify" XML documents
  • Fetch XML documents using http:// or ftp:// URLs
  • Browse tree structure of XML documents
  • 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, and vice versa.
The XMLStarlet command line utility is written in C and uses libxml2 and libxslt. Implementation of extensive choice of options for XMLStarlet utility was only possible because of rich feature set of both libraries: libxml2 and libxslt. XMLStarlet is linked statically to both libxml2 and libxslt, so generally all you need to process XML documents is one executable file.
XMLStarlet is open source free software released under an MIT License which allows free use and distribution for both commercial and non-commercial projects.

Examples

Consider the following XML document 'xmlfile1.xml' example:





en.wikipedia.org
de.wikipedia.org
fr.wikipedia.org
pl.wikipedia.org
es.wikipedia.org




en.wiktionary.org
fr.wiktionary.org
vi.wiktionary.org
tr.wiktionary.org
es.wiktionary.org




en.wikiversity.org





On a command prompt the following five XPath queries are executed on the above XML file 'xmlfile1.xml'.
  • Example 1: The XPath expression to select all name attributes for all projects.

$ xmlstarlet sel -t -v "//wikimedia/projects/project/@name" xmlfile1.xml
Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Wikiversity

  • Example 2: The XPath expression to select all attributes of the last Wikimedia project.

$ xmlstarlet sel -t -v "/wikimedia/projects/project/@*" xmlfile1.xml
Wikiversity
2006-10-04

  • Example 3: The XPath expression to select addresses of all Wiktionary editions.

$ xmlstarlet sel -t -v "/wikimedia/projects/project/editions/edition" xmlfile1.xml
en.wiktionary.org
fr.wiktionary.org
vi.wiktionary.org
tr.wiktionary.org
es.wiktionary.org

  • Example4: The XPath expression to select addresses of all Wikimedia Wiktionary editions that have languages different from Turkish and Spanish.

$ xmlstarlet sel -t -v "/wikimedia/projects/project/editions/edition" xmlfile1.xml
en.wiktionary.org
fr.wiktionary.org
vi.wiktionary.org

  • Example 5: The XPath expression to select all attributes of editions whose position is greater or equal to 3 in the list of editions.

$ xmlstarlet sel -t -v "/wikimedia/projects/project/editions/edition/@*" xmlfile1.xml
French
Polish
Spanish
Vietnamese
Turkish
Spanish

An XML document can be validated against an XSD schema saved in file 'xsdfile.xsd' as follows:

$ xmlstarlet val -e -s xsdfile.xsd xmlfile1.xml
xmlfile1.xml - valid