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Asked: 2026-06-08T03:05:40+00:00

I have an XML file containing texts in some languages. I want to extract

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I have an XML file containing texts in some languages. I want to extract the texts in just one language and store them in a separate file. How can I do this?
Here is some of the beginning lines of my file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<tmx version="1.4b">
  <header creationtool="ORESAligner" creationtoolversion="1.0" datatype="plaintext" segtype="paragraph" adminlang="en-us" srclang="EN" o-tmf="ORES"/>
  <body>
    <tu tuid="55_100:6">
      <prop type="session">55</prop>
      <prop type="committee">3</prop>
      <tuv xml:lang="EN">
        <seg>RESOLUTION 55/100</seg>
      </tuv>
      <tuv xml:lang="AR">
        <seg>القرار 55/100</seg>
      </tuv>
      <tuv xml:lang="ZH">
        <seg>第55/100号决议</seg>
      </tuv>
      <tuv xml:lang="FR">
        <seg>RÉSOLUTION 55/100</seg>
      </tuv>
      <tuv xml:lang="RU">
        <seg>РЕЗОЛЮЦИЯ 55/100</seg>
      </tuv>
      <tuv xml:lang="ES">
        <seg>RESOLUCIÓN 55/100</seg>
      </tuv>
    </tu>
  </body>
</tmx>

Now say I want just English texts. the desired output should be:

RESOLUTION 55/100

How should I use this script? I am newbie in working XML files, and don’t know how can I use this XPath expression. As I know xmlstarlet is able to modify XML files. But I don’t know how…?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Extract English Nodes with XmlStarlet

    You could use xmlstarlet to query your XML using XPath, and return just the nodes with an English-language attribute. For example:

    $ xmlstarlet sel -t -v "//tuv[@xml:lang='EN']/seg/text()" /tmp/foo
RESOLUTION 55/100

    Store Node Values in a File with Language Extension

    If you want to store those values in some language-based file, then you could dump the values of each node found into a file with a language-based extension (e.g. “EN” for English).

    # Don't overwrite LANG; use some other variable.
language='EN'

xmlstarlet sel \
    --noblanks \
    --text \
    --template \
    --match "//tuv[@xml:lang='${language}']" \
    --value-of seg \
    -n \
    /tmp/foo > "/tmp/foo.$language"

    With this example, the contents of all matching nodes will be written to /tmp/foo.EN for further processing. You can certainly adjust the shell redirection to suit any additional requirements.

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