Parse .xml file in a specific way

Question

I have the following .xml and I want a specific output:

<ContactPerson> <GivenName>John</GivenName> <FamilyName>Wayne</FamilyName> <PhoneFixList> <PhoneFix>78787878</PhoneFix> </PhoneFixList> <EmailList> <Email>[email protected]</Email> </EmailList> </ContactPerson> <ContactPerson> <GivenName>James</GivenName> <FamilyName>Stewart</FamilyName> <PhoneFixList> <PhoneFix>90909090</PhoneFix> </PhoneFixList> <EmailList> <Email>[email protected]</Email> </EmailList> </ContactPerson> 

Output:

John Wayne 78787878 [email protected] James Stewart 90909090 [email protected]

In some cases, I have more than two <ContactPerson> so I would be nice to have a great loop to resolve this. I've tried to resolve the problem with a for loop but I always have the result:

John Wayne 78787878 [email protected] John Wayne 78787878 [email protected]

Answer 1

Assuming the following (modified) XML:

<?xml version="1.0"?> <root> <ContactPerson> <GivenName>John</GivenName> <FamilyName>Wayne</FamilyName> <PhoneFixList> <PhoneFix>78787878</PhoneFix> </PhoneFixList> <EmailList> <Email>[email protected]</Email> </EmailList> </ContactPerson> <ContactPerson> <GivenName>James</GivenName> <FamilyName>Stewart</FamilyName> <PhoneFixList> <PhoneFix>90909090</PhoneFix> </PhoneFixList> <EmailList> <Email>[email protected]</Email> </EmailList> </ContactPerson> </root> 

The XMLStarlet invocation

xml sel -t -m '//ContactPerson' -v 'concat(GivenName, " ", FamilyName, " ", PhoneFixList/PhoneFix, " ", EmailList/Email)' -nl file.xml 

produces

John Wayne 78787878 [email protected] James Stewart 90909090 [email protected]

The invocation of XMLStarlet contains an implicit loop over all ContactPerson nodes, and for each of these, the specific fields are concatenated to produce the correct output. The -nl at the end causes a newline to be printed.

Answer 2

With xml2 (and a shell with support for the $'...' quotes):

{ echo "<r>"; cat file.xml; echo "</r>"; } | | xml2 | 2csv -d $'\t' ContactPerson GivenName FamilyName EmailList/Email 

(for ContactPersons with more than one email address, the last one is returned)

Answer 3

If you're OK with having a second file for processing this, you can make an XSLT file and use it to transform your XML file using xsltproc.

phones.xsl:

<?xml version="1.0"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:output method="text"/> <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/> <xsl:template match="ContactPerson"> <xsl:value-of select="GivenName"/><xsl:text> </xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="FamilyName"/> <xsl:for-each select="PhoneFixList/PhoneFix"> <xsl:text> </xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="."/> </xsl:for-each> <xsl:for-each select="EmailList/Email"> <xsl:text> </xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="."/> </xsl:for-each> <xsl:text>&#xA;</xsl:text> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> 

Then transform the file (using @Kusalananda's XML as phones.xml):

$ xsltproc phones.xsl phones.xml John Wayne 78787878 [email protected] James Stewart 90909090 [email protected]

Using XSLT has the advantage that you can loop through repeating elements, do conditional output and so forth. If you're comfortable with a bit of study and programming, it's very powerful.