I'd like to use xpath from xmllint to fetch a hostname and a serial number.
Here is the XML
<hosts>
<host name="blah001" serial="ABC001">
<moreinfo />
</host>
<host name="blah002" serial="ABC002">
<moreinfo />
</host>
..
</hosts>
I can fetch all serials with host name blah*:
/ > cat //hosts/host[starts-with(@name,"blah")]/@serial
-------
serial="ABC001"
-------
serial="ABC002"
But I also want to see which hostname had that serial. Is that possible?
This can be done in xmllint with following XPath expression. Let suppose your XML is named hosts.xml.
xmllint hosts.xml --xpath '//host[starts-with(@name,"blah")]/@name | //host[starts-with(@name,"blah")]/@serial' | xargs -n2
This is because the | operator in an XPath expression can support several paths.
Perhaps it would suffice to simply select all attributes of the host element?
$ xmllint example.xml --xpath "//hosts/host[starts-with(@name,"blah")]/@*" > out.txt
$ cat out.txt
name="blah001" serial="ABC001" name="blah002" serial="ABC002"
If that's not enough - if the output should be structured in a certain way, I'd recommend you write a simple XSLT transformation or use XQuery.
EDIT
so I will follow your suggestion and use xslt or xquery
Good, in case you decide for XSLT, the stylesheet you need would look similar to:
XSLT Stylesheet (1.0)
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<xsl:transform xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="text" encoding="UTF-8" />
<xsl:template match="host[starts-with(@name,'blah')]">
<xsl:value-of select="concat('HOST: ',@name, ' SERIAL: ', @serial)"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:transform>
Output
HOST: blah001 SERIAL: ABC001
HOST: blah002 SERIAL: ABC002
