How to execute XPath one-liners from shell?

Question

Is there a package out there, for Ubuntu and/or CentOS, that has a command-line tool that can execute an XPath one-liner like foo //element@attribute filename.xml or foo //element@attribute < filename.xml and return the results line by line?

I'm looking for something that would allow me to just apt-get install foo or yum install foo and then just works out-of-the-box, no wrappers or other adaptation necessary.

Here are some examples of things that come close:

Nokogiri. If I write this wrapper I could call the wrapper in the way described above:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'nokogiri'

Nokogiri::XML(STDIN).xpath(ARGV[0]).each do |row|
  puts row
end

XML::XPath. Would work with this wrapper:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::XPath;

my $root = XML::XPath->new(ioref => 'STDIN');
for my $node ($root->find($ARGV[0])->get_nodelist) {
  print($node->getData, "\n");
}

xpath from XML::XPath returns too much noise, -- NODE -- and attribute = "value".

xml_grep from XML::Twig cannot handle expressions that do not return elements, so cannot be used to extract attribute values without further processing.

EDIT:

echo cat //element/@attribute | xmllint --shell filename.xml returns noise similar to xpath.

xmllint --xpath //element/@attribute filename.xml returns attribute = "value".

xmllint --xpath 'string(//element/@attribute)' filename.xml returns what I want, but only for the first match.

For another solution almost satisfying the question, here is an XSLT that can be used to evaluate arbitrary XPath expressions (requires dyn:evaluate support in the XSLT processor):

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0"
    xmlns:dyn="http://exslt.org/dynamic" extension-element-prefixes="dyn">
  <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="no" method="text"/>
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:for-each select="dyn:evaluate($pattern)">
      <xsl:value-of select="dyn:evaluate($value)"/>
      <xsl:value-of select="'&#10;'"/>
    </xsl:for-each> 
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Run with xsltproc --stringparam pattern //element/@attribute --stringparam value . arbitrary-xpath.xslt filename.xml.

Answer 1

You should try these tools :

• xmlstarlet : can edit, select, transform... Not installed by default, xpath1
• xmllint : often installed by default with libxml2-utils, xpath1 (check my wrapper to have --xpath switch on very old releases and newlines delimited output (v < 2.9.9)
• xpath : installed via perl's module XML::XPath, xpath1
• xml_grep : installed via perl's module XML::Twig, xpath1 (limited xpath usage)
• xidel: xpath3
• saxon-lint : my own project, wrapper over @Michael Kay's Saxon-HE Java library, xpath3

xmllint comes with libxml2-utils (can be used as interactive shell with the --shell switch)

xmlstarlet is xmlstarlet.

xpath comes with perl's module XML::Xpath

xml_grep comes with perl's module XML::Twig

xidel is xidel

saxon-lint using SaxonHE 9.6 ,XPath 3.x (+retro compatibility)

Ex :

xmllint --xpath '//element/@attribute' file.xml
xmlstarlet sel -t -v "//element/@attribute" file.xml
xpath -q -e '//element/@attribute' file.xml
xidel -se '//element/@attribute' file.xml
saxon-lint --xpath '//element/@attribute' file.xml

• xmlstarlet page
• man xmllint
• xpath page
• xml_grep
• xidel
• saxon-lint

.