[SOLVED] How can I use the command line to split a single-lined XML into a multi-line XML

xexers · 12-09-2010, 07:00 AM

Hi,

I have a many text files that have XML tags all shoved into 1 line. I want to create a new file that splits each XML tag onto a new line.

Example

Input: <Company></Company><LinksUpToDate>false</LinksUpToDate><CharactersWithSpaces>54</CharactersWithSpaces><SharedDoc>false</SharedDoc>

Desired output:

<Company></Company>
<LinksUpToDate>false</LinksUpToDate>
<CharactersWithSpaces>54</CharactersWithSpaces>
<SharedDoc>false</SharedDoc>

I would like this to run in a shell script.
Any ideas?

Thanks!

fordeck · 12-09-2010, 07:12 AM

You could use sed to do this. I'm sure there are many ways to accomplish this, here is one quick way given the data set that you have provided:

Code:

sed 's/><[^/]/>\n</g' file.txt

Regards,

Fordeck

neonsignal · 12-09-2010, 07:17 AM

You could match your tag pairs using a regular expression like this:

Code:

perl -pe 's%(<[^>]*>[^<]*</[^>]*>)%$1\n%g' <input.txt >output.txt

but it will start getting overly complicated if you have to deal with nested tags and so on.

A better alternative would be to use an existing xml formatting tool such as xmlindent.

fordeck · 12-09-2010, 07:25 AM

I should have tested before I posted. The one line sed command is not doing what you asked at least not without some additional corrections. The previous post from "neonsignal" is a much better solution.

Sorry for the incorrect post.

Regards,

Fordeck