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Comment by edgarbob | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know of a similar tool for XML? In particular, it would be cool to have a useful way to run xpath, and maybe xquery, from the command line. The tools I've found have unfortunate interfaces, e.g. they won't read XML from stdin.

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Have you tried XMLStarlet[1]? It's my go-to for command line XML processing.

[1] http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/

Even with libxml's xmllint you can do some xpath stuff: http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Xml_grep

I'd just use xml2json and then apply jq. Usually gets the job done. The benefit of that is that you only need to learn jq.

See this blog post I wrote a while ago for an example: http://jeroenjanssens.com/2013/09/19/seven-command-line-tool...

Most of the JSON conversions from XML get it all wrong though. XML is not really an object (dict, hash) based meta-schema. It's an array-based meta-schema. XML->JSON conversions should look something like this:

    [ {"tag":"something", "attributes": { ... }, "nodes": [ ...] }, ... ]

with nodes being objects with one key to indicate if the node is a text node or an element, and if a text node then a value, and so on.

You might check out these:

http://www.w3.org/Tools/HTML-XML-utils/

However, I just use a Ruby script which loads the Nokogiri library:

https://github.com/clarkgrubb/data-tools/blob/master/src/dom...

https://github.com/clarkgrubb/data-tools/blob/master/doc/dom...

I am not a huge fan of PHP, but you can do some useful stuff to XML using the PHP command line tool, provided you have the right libraries installed. I have run into situations where the package manager on a machine I'm using doesn't have an up to date xmlstartlet or xmllint, and have tidily gotten around this problem using PHP.

xmllint - http://xmlsoft.org/xmllint.html

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