$ xmlstarlet elements planets.xml
xml
xml/sol
xml/sol/planet
xml/sol/planet/name
xml/sol/planet/albedo
xml/sol/planet
xml/sol/planet/name
xml/sol/planet/albedo
xml/sol/planet
xml/sol/planet/name
xml/sol/planet/albedo

$ xmlstarlet select -t --value-of '/xml/sol/planet' planets.xml

        Mercury
        0.11

        Venus
        0.7

        Terra
        0.39

$ xmlstarlet select -t --value-of '/xml/sol/planet[3]' planets.xml
Terra
0.39

$ xmlstarlet select -t --value-of '/xml/sol/planet[albedo > 0.25]' planets.xml

Venus
0.7

Terra
0.39

$ xmlstarlet select -t --value-of '/xml/sol/planet[position() < 3]' planets.xml

Mercury
0.11

Venus
0.7

Comments

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Comment #1 posted on 2021-08-05 14:54:19 by norrist

My one cool xmlstarlet trick

I had to install an xml config file on a bunch of servers.
The xml was the same for every server except the hostname had to be added to a specific field.

My first thought was to use sed, but anyone who has tried parsing xml with regex knows just how far I got.

Searching for something like sed that understood xml tags led me to xmlstarlet.
Here is the command I used to add the hostname of the server to the xml path "info/host-id":

xmlstarlet ed --inplace -u info/host-id -v `hostname -f` /path/to/info.xml

Comment #2 posted on 2021-12-22 18:54:26 by dnt

I consulted this episode this week

When I listened to "We need to talk about XML", I nodded in agreement. Working in localization there's a lot of XLIFF, so I have learned to appreciate it. This week I had a chance to use xmlstarlet at work, so I came back and had another listen to this. There was some trouble figuring out the deal with XML namespaces, I found that in xmlstarlet you can use //_:node where the underscore stands for the default namespace. For now, this just worked, but I do need to learn more about namespaces. Thanks again!

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