46

I want to get the value of name and put it in a variable using XMLLint

<body>
<value name="abc"></value>
</body>

echo 'cat //body/value/@name' | xmllint --shell "test.xml"

/ >  -------
 name="abc"
/ >

So I want to assign the value "abc" to variable $test

Flow
  • 23,572
  • 15
  • 99
  • 156
Tran Ngu Dang
  • 2,540
  • 6
  • 29
  • 38

6 Answers6

50

You need to use fn:string(), which will return the value of its argument as xs:string. In case its argument is an attribute, it will therefore return the attribute's value as xs:string.

test=$(xmllint --xpath "string(//body/value/@name)" test.xml)
Flow
  • 23,572
  • 15
  • 99
  • 156
h0li0
  • 621
  • 5
  • 6
9

Try this, it's not beautiful but it works :)

I just erase lines containing > from stdout , cut the string to get the second part after the = , and delete "

test=$(echo 'cat //body/value/@name' | xmllint --shell "test.xml" | grep -v ">" | cut -f 2 -d "=" | tr -d \"); 
echo $test
GDP
  • 8,109
  • 6
  • 45
  • 82
ego
  • 91
  • 1
7

An approach with a helper awk command that supports multiple attributes (a streamlined version of ego's approach):

echo 'cat //*/@name' | xmllint --shell file | awk -F\" 'NR % 2 == 0 { print $2 }'

The awk command:

  • splits xmllint's output lines into fields by " chars. (-F\")

    • Note that xmllint normalizes quoting around attribute values to "..." on output, even if the input had '...', so it's sufficient to split by ".

  • only processes even-numbered lines (NR %2 == 0), thereby filtering out the separator lines that cat invariably prints.

  • print $2 then prints only the 2nd field, which is the value of each attribute without the enclosing "...".

Assuming the following sample XML in file:

<body>
  <value name="abc"></value>
  <value name="def"></value>
</body>

the above yields:

abc
def
mklement0
  • 382,024
  • 64
  • 607
  • 775
  • this works perfectly for me, thanks. Do you also have a nice way of assigning the values to different variables. Like VAR_1=$(echo 'cat //*/@name' | xmllint --shell file | awk -F\" 'NR % 2 == 0 { print $2 }') ? – dieHellste Nov 27 '17 at 08:08
  • @dieHellste: You can `read` the output lines into variables (either in a `while` loop or, in Bash, into an array with `read -a`); if you need further guidance, please ask a new question. – mklement0 Nov 27 '17 at 12:41
4

I recently had to port my original simpler solution using --xpath to a platform lacking this feature, so had to adopt the "cat" solution too. This will handle multiple matches, tested on Ubuntu 12.04 and Solaris 11:

getxml() { # $1 = xml file, $2 = xpath expression
    echo "cat $2" | xmllint --shell $1 |\
    sed -n 's/[^\"]*\"\([^\"]*\)\"[^\"]*/\1/gp'
}

e.g. extracting instance names from a glassfish domain config:

$ getxml /tmp/test.xml "//server[@node-ref]/@name"
inst1
inst2

The sed post-processing just grabs all quoted values which was adequate for my needs (getting bits of glassfish config).

steve.sims
  • 106
  • 5
1

With the goal of matching multiple lines and extract the value of their homonymous attribute and building on previous answers this worked for me and it's shorter hehe

xmllint --xpath "//*/@value" file.xml | awk -F\" '{ print $2 }'
Cristiano
  • 11
  • 1
  • 2
0

The next works for me:

xmllint --xpath '//o/@loc' file.xml | sed -n 's/[^\"]*\"\([^\"]*\)\"[^\"]*/\1\n/gp'
Volodya Lombrozo
  • 2,325
  • 2
  • 16
  • 34