XMLStarlet

External

• https://www.baeldung.com/linux/evaluate-xpath#using-the-xmlstarlet-toolkit
• http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/

Internal

• XPath
• XSLT

Overview

XMLStartlet ships with one executable called xml, which can be used as the short form of the xmlstarlet command.

XPath Syntax

XPath Syntax

Usage

xml [options] <command> [command options]

sel Command

Select (query) an XML file using XPath. It can also generate an XSLT document. Internally, when sel command is used, the tool converts internally the commands into an XSLT to perform the query.

xml sel --help

sel -t

Create an XSLT template using the provided options.

xml sel -t <template options> <xml-file-name>

Return codes:

• If the path does not match anything, the command return an empty stdout/stderr and an "1" exit code.
• If the file does not exist, the command returns "3" as exit code and a message along the lines of 'failed to load external entity "<file-name>"'.

-t -c

Print a copy of XPath expression. Return the element (elements) that match the provided XPath expression, including the XML tags.

xml sel -t -c "<xpath-expression>" <xml-file-name>

xml sel -t -c "//book[@category='linux']" <xml-file-name>

The example is taken from XPath | Example.

-t -v

Print the value of the XPath expression. The XML tags are omitted from the output.

xml sel -t -v "<xpath-expression>" <xml-file-name>

xml sel -t -v "//book[@category='linux']" <xml-file-name>

The example is taken from XPath | Example.

ed Command

Edit an XML file.

tr Command

Transform an XML file using XSLT.