we can find xml file type as the follwing
find /tmp/ -type f -name '*.xml'
but how to change the syntax in order to find only xml that contain with:
<Name>some words</Name>
and print what is between:
<Name> ------ </Name>
expected output
some words
example - xml file contain:
<Name>files_with_extra_data</Name>
expected output
files_with_extra_data
A simple solution would be to use sed:
find /tmp -name '*.xml' -exec sed -n 's/<Name>\([^<]*\)<\/Name>/\1/p' {} +
The regex matches the tags and prints what is in between. If we remove the scape characters is easier to read:
s / <Name>([^<]*)</Name> / \1
The parenthesis matches any character which is not "<" and gets mapped to \1
As mentioned in the comments this would be a simple solution, regular expressions can not cope with all of the possible variations of structured text. So if you have multiple lines between tags or other tags it won't work and you will need to use a real xml parser
For a simple XML job like this, I'd use xml2 and cut. (or sed, or awk, or perl).
find . -iname '*.xml' -exec bash -c 'xml2 < {}' \; | grep '/Name=' |
cut -d '=' -f2-
or
find . -iname '*.xml' -exec bash -c 'xml2 < {}' \; | sed -n -e 's/^[^=]*\/Name=//p'
or
find . -iname '*.xml' -exec bash -c 'xml2 < {}' \; |
awk -F'=' '/Name=/ {$1=""; sub(/^ /,"",$0); print }'
(The sub() function call in the awk version strips the leading space left after setting $1 to "" - awk doesn't have a way of deleting fields from the input line, the best you can do is set it to the empty string and clean up afterwards. Alternatively, split() the line into an an array, delete the field(s) you don't want, and then join the array into a string for printing. awk doesn't have a join() function like perl so you'll have to write your own)
or
find . -iname '*.xml' -exec bash -c 'xml2 < {}' \; |
perl -F= -lane 'if (m:/Name=:) { delete @F[0]; print @F}'
xml2 converts XML formatted data into a line-oriented format suitable for processing with line-oriented text utilities like awk, or sed, or perl and many others. It comes with a corresponding 2xml program which can convert that line-oriented format back to properly formatted XML.
For more complicated tasks, I'd use xmlstarlet
xmlstarlet is an XML processing tool that you can use to list, query, extract, and modify data in XML files.
Both are available packaged for debian and other Linux distros.
The, IMO, best solution is to use a language like perl or python that has an XML parsing library, and use that. xmlstarlet is great for working with XML files in shell, but constructing the command-line for very complicated searches becomes more work (and much harder to read and debug) than just writing a script in perl or python to do the job. That's partly because I do a lot more programming in those languages and find it much easier to work with...but mostly because IMO it's better to concentrate your learning effort on general-purpose languages that can be used for a wide variety of tasks than on domain-specific languages/tools that can only be used for one very specific thing.
XML::Parser or XML::Twig or XML::Simple depending on what I needed to do. That ("use a language with an XML lib") is the correct solution if you don't have xml2 or sxmltarlet.
Name.
With pcregrep:
pcregrep -rMh --include='\.xml\z' -o1 '(?s)<name>(.*?)</name>' .
sed -n '/Name/{s/.*<Name>//;s/<\/Name.*//;p;}' "$FULL_XML_PATH"
