Bash script: Get XML elements into array using xmllint

Question

This is a follow up question to this post.

I want to end up with an array, containing all the <description> elements of the xml.

array[0] = "<![CDATA[A title for .... <br />]]>"
array[1] = "<![CDATA[A title for .... <br />]]>"

...

file.xml:

<item>
    <description><![CDATA[A title for the URLs<br /><br />

    http://www.foobar.com/foo/bar
    <br />http://bar.com/foo
    <br />http://myurl.com/foo
    <br />http://desiredURL.com/files/ddd
    <br />http://asdasd.com/onefile/g.html
    <br />http://second.com/link
    <br />]]></description> 


</item>
    </item>
<description> ...</description>
    <item>

I want to extract values from each array object. What better solution thatn an array would you suggest? What would be an Xpath expression for that? — tzippy
– tzippy, Commented Dec 10, 2013 at 13:54

Édouard Lopez · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-29 09:35:00Z

17

A Bash solution could be

let itemsCount=$(xmllint --xpath 'count(//item/description)' /tmp/so.xml)
declare -a description=( )

for (( i=1; i <= $itemsCount; i++ )); do 
    description[$i]="$(xmllint --xpath '//item['$i']/description' /tmp/so.xml)"
done

echo ${description[@]}

Disclaimer

Consider that bash may not be the right tool. XSLT/XPath could give you direct access to the content of the description element as describe in previous answer. For instance:

xmllint --xpath '//item/description/text()' /tmp/so.xml

Return every <description> content

edited Jun 29, 2016 at 9:35

answered Dec 10, 2013 at 14:00

Édouard Lopez

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3 Comments

tzippy Over a year ago

Thank you! The thing is that, what you described in your disclaimer, returns all the content of the description elements in one string. That's not too useful for further processing.

Édouard Lopez Over a year ago

code before disclaimer should do what you ask. Disclaimer is here to only if you don't care/need the element description that serve as source

JulianM Over a year ago

I think in the bash solution it should be "smallerThanOrEqualTo" <= for (( i=1; i <= $itemsCount; i++ )); do

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