xpath read value without tag

yozh · 07-17-2015, 11:59 AM

Hello.

help a noob out please!!°

Im doing an small bash script, i need to read the values off an xml file, i had success reading the values with:

xpath xml.file tag

the output of that command is something like this:

<tag>Value that needs to be posted somewhere else</tag>

is there anyway to get the output without the tags???

i been surfing around but i havent found a solution.

thanks in advance.

HMW · 07-17-2015, 01:21 PM

Not that I know anything about xpath, but can you pipe the result to sed? Like this:

Code:

echo "<tag>Value that needs to be posted somewhere else</tag>" | sed 's/^<tag>\(.*\)<\/tag>/\1/'
Value that needs to be posted somewhere else

Best regards,
HMW

yozh · 07-17-2015, 07:15 PM

Hello.

Thanks for your quick reply i really appreciate it.

the value that im pulling from the xml is called from a variable wich has the xpath command to read it.

x="$(xpath my.xml //tag)"

I dont think i can pipe it to sed in that way just tried:

echo "$x | sed 's/^<tag>$.*$<\/tag>/\1/'.

HMW · 07-18-2015, 05:20 AM

Hello again!

Yes, you can. Your echo statement has errors, take a look at this example:

Code:

XPATH="<tag>Some text parsed from xpath</tag>"

Now the variable $XPATH holds a string with tags just like your example.

You can remove the tags in the variable like this:

Code:

echo $XPATH | sed 's/^<tag>\(.*\)<\/tag>/\1/'
Some text parsed from xpath

You can even assign the new string, without the tags to a new variable "on the fly" if you like:

Code:

NOTAGS=$(echo $XPATH | sed 's/^<tag>\(.*\)<\/tag>/\1/')
echo $NOTAGS 
Some text parsed from xpath

I hope that helped to clear things up.
Best regards,
HMW

Edit:
In your case, you ought to be able to do something like this:

Code:

NOTAGS=$(xpath my.xml //tag | sed 's/^<tag>\(.*\)<\/tag>/\1/')