xmlstarlet Command Examples

A command-line XML/XSLT toolkit. Note: You will likely need to know XPath: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XPath. More information: https://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/docs.php.

• Format an XML document and print to stdout:

xmlstarlet format {{path/to/file.xml}}

• XML document can also be piped from stdin:

{{cat path/to/file.xml}} | xmlstarlet format

• Print all nodes that match a given XPath:

xmlstarlet select --template --copy-of {{xpath}} {{path/to/file.xml}}

• Insert an attribute to all matching nodes, and print to stdout (source file is unchanged):

xmlstarlet edit --insert {{xpath}} --type attr --name {{attribute_name}} --value {{attribute_value}} {{path/to/file.xml}}

• Update the value of all matching nodes in place (source file is changed):

xmlstarlet edit --inplace --update {{xpath}} --value {{new_value}} {{file.xml}}

• Delete all matching nodes in place (source file is changed):

xmlstarlet edit --inplace --delete {{xpath}} {{file.xml}}

• Escape or unescape special XML characters in a given string:

xmlstarlet [un]escape {{string}}

• List a given directory as XML (omit argument to list current directory):

xmlstarlet ls {{path/to/directory}}