Question

I am using this line of code to get two data entries from an XML file

perl xmlPerl.pl zbxml.xml "//zabbix_export/templates/template/items/item/name/text() | //zabbix_export/templates/template/items/item/description/text()"

Which takes the data, and displays it vertically. For example:

• name1
• description1
• name2
• description2

I used this in c# and had some code so that it would display like this

• name1 – description1
• name2 – description2
• name3 – (blank since there
  isnt a description)

there were even some blanks in description. Here is the c# code, since it may help.

XPathExpression expr;
        expr = nav.Compile("/zabbix_export/templates/template/items/item/name | /zabbix_export/templates/template/items/item/description");
        XPathNodeIterator iterator = nav.Select(expr);

        //Iterate on the node set
        List<string> listBox1 = new List<string>();
        listBox1.Clear();
        try
        {
            while (iterator.MoveNext())
            {

                XPathNavigator nav2 = iterator.Current.Clone();
               // nav2.Value;
                listBox1.Add(nav2.Value);
                Console.Write(nav2.Value);
                iterator.MoveNext();
                nav2 = iterator.Current.Clone();
                Console.Write("-" + nav2.Value + "\n");

Well, I am having to switch it to Perl now, and I am not sure if I should try and find some Perl code to do what I need, or if this can be done in XPath? I tried looking at some w3 tutorials, but didn’t find what I was looking for.

Thanks!

edit –
would I need to edit this part of my xmlPerl.pl

# print each node in the list
foreach my $node ( $nodeset->get_nodelist ) {
print XML::XPath::XMLParser::as_string( $node ) . "\n";
}

Answer 1

It cannot be done with an XPath. It can be done with an XSL transformation:

<xsl:stylesheet 
  version="1.0" 
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

  <xsl:output method="text"/>

  <xsl:template match="text()"/>

  <xsl:template match="item">
    <xsl:value-of select="concat(name,' - ',description,'&#x0d;&#x0a;')"/>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

A simple Perl script that applies this XSLT will do the trick – see this for example (or any other command-line utility that applies an XSLT for that matter – like msxsl.exe)