extract xml from the command line

I just discovered this morning this cool utility in my /bin directory : xmllint

You can use it to extract values from your xml files within your shell scripts

$ cat foo.xml John Jack $ echo 'cat //emplist/emp[@no="1"]/ename/text()'| xmllint --shell foo.xml | sed -n 3p John

I like this !

5 thoughts on “extract xml from the command line”

egravers July 8, 2010 at 03:11

sed -n 3p
did not work for me
sed -n 2p
did work!

…or use sed to delete the lines with the “/ > ” prompt?

sed ‘/^\/ >/ d’
Laurent Schneider Post authorJuly 8, 2010 at 10:45

Ok, you have got a different input, thanks for your feedback
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Arif Akram Khan July 13, 2015 at 22:42

Can we extract the attribute value using xmllint?
Laurent Schneider Post authorJuly 14, 2015 at 11:20

you use /@attr
$ echo 'cat //emplist/emp[@no="1"]/@no'| xmllint --shell foo.xml |grep '"'| cut -d'"' -f2 1

and to get the attribute name, use dir

$ echo 'dir //emplist/emp[1]'| xmllint --shell foo.xml| awk '$1=="ATTRIBUTE"{print $2}' no

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