XmlStarlet Command Line
XML Toolkit User's Guide
Mikhail Grushinskiy
XmlStarlet Command Line XML Toolkit User's Guide
Mikhail Grushinskiy
iii
Table of Contents
1. Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1
1. About XmlStarlet .................................................................................................... 1
2. Main Features ......................................................................................................... 1
3. Supported Platforms ................................................................................................. 2
4. Finding binary packages ........................................................................................... 2
2. Installation ..................................................................................................................... 3
1. Installation on Linux ................................................................................................ 3
2. Installation on Solaris ............................................................................................... 3
3. Installation on MacOS X .......................................................................................... 3
4. Installation on Windows ........................................................................................... 3
3. Getting Started ................................................................................................................ 4
1. Basic Command-Line Options ................................................................................... 4
2. Studying Structure of XML Document ........................................................................ 4
4. XmlStarlet Reference ....................................................................................................... 7
1. Querying XML documents ........................................................................................ 7
2. Transforming XML documents ................................................................................. 13
3. Editing XML documents ......................................................................................... 14
4. Validating XML documents ..................................................................................... 18
5. Formatting XML documents .................................................................................... 19
6. Canonicalization of XML documents ........................................................................ 20
7. XML and PYX format ............................................................................................ 22
8. Escape/Unescape special XML characters .................................................................. 23
9. List directory as XML ............................................................................................ 24
5. Common problems ......................................................................................................... 26
1. Namespaces and default namespace .......................................................................... 26
1.1. The Problem: Why does nothing match? ......................................................... 26
1.2. The Solution ............................................................................................... 26
1.3. A More Convenient Solution ......................................................................... 26
1.4. Deleting namespace declarations .................................................................... 27
2. Special characters .................................................................................................. 27
3. Sorting ................................................................................................................. 27
4. Validation ............................................................................................................. 28
6. Other XmlStarlet Resources ............................................................................................. 29
1
Chapter 1. Introduction
1. About XmlStarlet
XMLStarlet [http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/] is a set of command line utilities (tools) which can be used
to transform, query, validate, and edit XML documents and files using simple set of shell commands in
similar way it is done for plain text files using UNIX grep, sed, awk, diff, patch, join, etc commands.
This set of command line utilities can be used by those who deal with many XML documents on UNIX
shell command prompt as well as for automated XML processing with shell scripts.
XMLStarlet command line utility is written in C and uses libxml2 and libxslt from http://xmlsoft.org/.
Implementation of extensive choice of options for XMLStarlet utility was only possible because of rich
feature set of libxml2 and libxslt (many thanks to the developers of those libraries for great work).
'diff' and 'patch' options are not currently implemented. Other features need some work too. Please, send
an email to the project administrator (see http://sourceforge.net/projects/xmlstar/) if you wish to help.
XMLStarlet is linked statically to both libxml2 and libxslt, so generally all you need to process XML
documents is one executable file. To run XmlStarlet utility you can simple type 'xml' on command line
and see list of options available.
XMLStarlet is open source freeware under MIT license which allows free use and distribution for both
commercial and non-commercial projects.
We welcome any user's feedback on this project which would greatly help us to improve its quality.
Comments, suggestions, feature requests, bug reports can be done via SourceForge project web site (see
XMLStarlet Sourceforge forums [http://sourceforge.net/p/xmlstar/discussion/], or XMLStarlet mailing list
[http://sourceforge.net/p/xmlstar/mailman/])
2. Main Features
The toolkit's feature set includes options to:
• Check or validate XML files (simple well-formedness check, DTD, XSD, RelaxNG)
• Calculate values of XPath expressions on XML files (such as running sums, etc)
• Search XML files for matches to given XPath expressions
• Apply XSLT stylesheets to XML documents (including EXSLT support, and passing parameters to
stylesheets)
• Query XML documents (ex. query for value of some elements of attributes, sorting, etc)
• Modify or edit XML documents (ex. delete some elements)
• Format or "beautify" XML documents (as changing indentation, etc)
• Fetch XML documents using http:// or ftp:// URLs
• Browse tree structure of XML documents (in similar way to 'ls' command for directories)
• Include one XML document into another using XInclude
Introduction
2
• XML c14n canonicalization
• Escape/unescape special XML characters in input text
• Print directory as XML document
• Convert XML into PYX format (based on ESIS - ISO 8879), and vice versa
3. Supported Platforms
Here is a list of platforms on which XmlStarlet is known to work.
• Linux
• Solaris
• Windows
• MacOS X
• FreeBSD/NetBSD
• HP-UX
• AIX
You might be able to compile and make it on others too.
4. Finding binary packages
Here is a list of sites where you can also find XmlStarlet binary packages.
• SuSE Packages [http://www.suse.com/us/private/products/suse_linux/prof/packages_professional/
xmlstarlet.html]
• SuSE Guru's RPM Site [http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/rpm-navigation.php?cat=%2FUtili-
ties%2Fxmlstarlet/]
• FreeBSD Ports [http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=xmlstarlet&stype=all]
• FreeBSD Fresh Ports [http://www.freshports.org/textproc/xmlstarlet/]
• Mac OS Fink [http://fink.sourceforge.net/pdb/package.php/xmlstarlet]
• Mandrake RPMs [http://rpms.mandrakeclub.com/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=xmlstarlet]
• Gentoo Portage [http://gentoo-portage.com/app-text/xmlstarlet]
• Debian [http://packages.debian.org/stable/text/xmlstarlet]
