Parsing xml into array using xmllint

Question

I have xml file with multiple <db> elements, I need to extract attributes from each node and do some work on them.

IS it possible to load them to array, using ksh and xmllint ?

This is what I have:

xml file:

<?xml version="1.0"?> <main> <resources> <db> <table_name tableid="001" user="mike">customer</table_name> </db> <db> <table_name tableid="002" user="david">orders</table_name> </db> </resources> </main> 

script:

#!/usr/bin/ksh tbid="$(echo "cat /main/resources/db/table_name/@tableid" | xmllint --shell data.xml )" username="$(echo "cat /main/resources/db/table_name/@user" | xmllint --shell data.xml )" echo $tbid echo $username 

Output:

/ > ------- tableid="001" ------- tableid="002" / > / > ------- user="mike" ------- user="david" / > 

eventually, I want to get a kind of 2-dim array:

arr[0],[0]=001 arr[0],[1]=mike arr[1],[0]=002 arr[1],[1]=david 

Notes:
xpath is not supported in xmllint , and can't be installed.
array can be represented in any other way, I just need to be able to extract and do some work.

Answer 1

I'm going to offer how I'd tackle it, because you don't have any answers yet - I'd use the excellent XML::Twig module, and perl:

#!/usr/bin/env perl use strict; use warnings; use XML::Twig; my $twig = XML::Twig -> new -> parsefile ( 'data.xml' ); foreach my $table ( $twig -> get_xpath('//table_name') ) { print $table -> att('tableid'), " => ", $table -> att('user'), "\n"; } 

This prints:

001 => mike 002 => david 

Perl has a built in data structure called a hash, that might suit your needs too (depending what you're wanting):

#!/usr/bin/env perl use strict; use warnings; use Data::Dumper; use XML::Twig; my $twig = XML::Twig -> new -> parse ( \*DATA ); my %table_for; foreach my $table ( $twig -> get_xpath('//table_name') ) { my $tableid = $table -> att('tableid'); my $user = $table -> att('user'); $table_for{$user} = $tableid; } print Dumper \%table_for; 

You can iterate keys in %table_for (there's many possibilities, but I'll need an idea of what you want to expand on them)