Question

I am wondering if there is any way to create a batch file that can edit a line in an XML document. The line would be identified by the preceding line. the idea would be as follows:

If line == Csetting name="BaseDirectory" serializeAs="String">
    Next line = <value>User Input from begining of batch</value>

is something like that even posible or am I dreaming outside of my means? Thanks for the help and the answers.

Answer 1

You probably could hack something together in a batch file that works somehow. But it will be extraordinarily painful. First of all, I know of no way of reliably reading lines into variables in a batch file and writing them back to a file unaltered. You can escape most of the problematic characters (such as <, >, &, |, …) but there still are problems I couldn’t solve¹ (such as unmatched quotation marks) that will cause such attempts to fail horribly. Then you still wouldn’t be able to parse XML but you’d rather to primitive text processing which may easily fail as soon as maybe single quotes are used instead of double quotes. Or an extra space is thrown in somewhere. Or the line you’re looking for is split into several lines. All valid XML but painful to parse when no XML parser is around.

The batch file language isn’t really suited for such tasks. Heck, it barely works for text processing but XML is way beyond. You may have more luck (and fun) with using VBScript and MSXML or even PowerShell (if applicable).

VBScript is probably the most sane choice here as you can rely on it existing on virtually any modern Windows machine.

You could also use XSLT and call that from the command-line. There are enough XSLT processors out there that can be used and generating an XSLT file is actually much simpler (but will still require several escapings).

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¹ Note that I may be an advanced batch file user/programmer but by no means authoritative. Maybe it’s easily possible and I’m just too stupid to see it.