Question

I am trying to process an XML file using only Linux CLI tools.
The main problem that I am trying to solve is to copy the contents of a specific XML tag into a new tag, like so:

<date>Wednesday</date>
<name>The Name</name>
<anotherattribute>Attribute</anotherattribute>

into:

<date>Wednesday</date>
<id>The Name</id>
<name>The Name</name>
<anotherattribute>Attribute</anotherattribute>

I have been trying to use sed to solve this problem, and have been able to identify the tag, and copy it into the hold buffer:

/<name>/{
h
i\
<id>
G
a\
</id>
}

but that results in:

<date>Wednesday</date>
<id>
<name>The Name</name>
<name>The Name</name>
</id>
<anotherattribute>Attribute</anotherattribute>

Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

Try this:

sed '/<name>/{h;s/name>/id>/g;G}'

---

You can also try xmlstarlet:

cat input.xml |
    xmlstarlet ed -i //name -t elem -n id -v '' |
        xmlstarlet ed -u //id -x '../name'