Grep and Sed Equivalent for XML Command Line Processing

I've found xmlstarlet to be pretty good at this sort of thing.

http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/

Should be available in most distro repositories, too. An introductory tutorial is here:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-starlet.html

Some promising tools:

• nokogiri: parsing HTML/XML DOMs in ruby using XPath & CSS selectors

• hpricot: deprecated

• fxgrep:Uses its own XPath-like syntax to query documents. Written in SML, so installation may be difficult.

• LT XML:XML toolkit derived from SGML tools, including sggrep, sgsort, xmlnorm and others. Uses its own query syntax. The documentation is very formal. Written in C. LT XML 2 claims support of XPath, XInclude and other W3C standards.

• xmlgrep2:simple and powerful searching with XPath. Written in Perl using XML::LibXML and libxml2.

• XQSharp:Supports XQuery, the extension to XPath. Written for the .NET Framework.

• xml-coreutils:Laird Breyer's toolkit equivalent to GNU coreutils. Discussed in an interesting essay on what the ideal toolkit should include.

• xmldiff:Simple tool for comparing two xml files.

• xmltk: doesn't seem to have package in debian, ubuntu, fedora, or macports, hasn't had a release since 2007, and uses non-portable build automation.

xml-coreutils seems the best documented and most UNIX-oriented.

To Joseph Holsten's excellent list, I add the xpath command-line script which comes with Perl library XML::XPath. A great way to extract information from XML files:

 xpath -q -e '/entry[@xml:lang="fr"]' *xml