extract block from XML with different ending tags (<tag>...</tag> vs <tag ... />)

Question

Given an XML with some blocks ending within the same tag and others with a separate tag:

<parent name="parent_1" team="team_a"> <child name="child_1" team="team_b"/> </parent> <parent name="parent_2" team="team_c"/> <parent name="parent_3" team="team_b"/> 

How can extract the block for a given name?

I have:

awk "/<parent name=\"$name\"/,/<\/parent>/" $file 

which would work for $name=parent_1, and:

awk "/<parent name=\"$name\"/,/\/>/" $file 

which would work for parent_2 or parent_3 but not sure how to do both.

I tried:

awk "/<parent name=\"$name\"/,/[\/>|<\/parent>]/" $file 

as an OR condition but for parent_1 it still gives me:

 <parent name="parent_1" team="team_a"> 

Can that be done?

Answer 1

With a proper xml parser: xmllint:

file:

<root> <parent name="parent_1" team="team_a"> <child name="child_1" team="team_b"/> </parent> <parent name="parent_2" team="team_c"/> <parent name="parent_3" team="team_b"/> </root> 

$ xmllint --xpath '//parent[@name="parent_1"]' file <parent name="parent_1" team="team_a"> <child name="child_1" team="team_b"/> </parent>