Is there a command line command or utility I can use to show only the tag structure of an xml document? I looked at xmllint but I didn't see a switch to do it. For a structure like
<tag1><tag2><tag2-5>value1</tag2-5><tag3>value2</tag3></tag2></tag1>
I want to see
<tag1><tag2><tag2-5></tag2-5><tag3></tag3></tag2></tag1>
I think (but am not at all sure) that you can get away with just stripping out the characters between > and < globally:
sed 's/>[^<]*</></g' /path/to/file.xml
<foo>hello↲world</foo> where ↲ is a newline. Nor CDATA (if you have this, you need a real HTML parser).
The following xmlstarlet command would set the values of each text-only node in your document to an empty string. It would additionally preserve whitespaces between nodes (not do pretty-printing) and omit adding an XML declaration tag (<?xml...?>):
xmlstarlet ed -P -O -u '//child::text()' -v '' file.xml
Given your example document in file.xml, this would produce
<tag1><tag2><tag2-5></tag2-5><tag3></tag3></tag2></tag1>
Without the -P and -O options:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<tag1>
<tag2>
<tag2-5></tag2-5>
<tag3></tag3>
</tag2>
</tag1>
One could also use
xmlstarlet ed -d '//child::text()' file.xml
to delete the values rather than setting them to an empty string, but that would generate nodes with no value (rather than nodes with an empty value):
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<tag1>
<tag2>
<tag2-5/>
<tag3/>
</tag2>
</tag1>
Adding the -P and -O options would generate
<tag1><tag2><tag2-5/><tag3/></tag2></tag1>
Depending on what it is that you actually want to do, one could use the el (elements) sub-command of xmlstarlet to get another representation of the document structure:
xmlstarlet el file.xml
The output for your example:
tag1
tag1/tag2
tag1/tag2/tag2-5
tag1/tag2/tag3
See also xmlstarlet el --help.
