xml_grep get attribute from element

Question

Is it possible (and if so, how) with xml_grep to get the value of a specific attribute from a specific element? I only seem to be able to output the information between tags.

example:

    <eid>
       <identity nationalnumber="13021912354" dateofbirth="20130219" gender="male">
          <name>Menten</name>
          <firstname>Kasper</firstname>
          <middlenames>Marie J</middlenames>
          <nationality>Belg</nationality>
          <placeofbirth>Sint-Truiden</placeofbirth>
          <photo>base64-string</photo>
       </identity>
    </eid>

output the value (in this case: 13021912354) of the 'nationalnumber'-attribute from the 'identity'-element

Gilles Quénot · Accepted Answer · 2016-10-17T13:59:04.723

9

With xmllint :

xmllint --xpath 'string(//identity/@nationalnumber)' file.xml

For debian distro (or derivatives) xmllint is part of the libxml2-utils package and can be installed so:

apt-get install libxml2-utils

edited Oct 17 '16 at 13:59

answered Feb 19 '13 at 14:06

Gilles Quénot

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For me it only worked when I used the answer given here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/11906002/1306012 – Bruno Bieri Oct 17 '16 at 12:27
@gilles-quenot For multiple ``s in a single file, if I want to extract `dateofbirth` for particular `nationalnumber`.....how should I achieve that? – Khurshid Alam Nov 22 '16 at 11:40

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 21 '13 at 15:37

2

The version of xmllint that I have installed on RHEL6.3 doesn't seem to have this magic --xpath option. What version of xmllint provides support for this option?

answered Feb 21 '13 at 15:37

Robert Boyd

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xmllint: using libxml version 20800 – sarkasper Mar 14 '13 at 18:01

xml_grep get attribute from element

2 Answers2

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