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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T08:28:05+00:00

I want to parse XML in bash and xpath could do it. (To get

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I want to parse XML in bash and xpath could do it.

(To get “Description” element with subelement “em:minVersion=2.1”) query like this works well:

xpath install.rdf /RDF/Description/em:targetApplication/Description[em:minVersion=2.1]

But this won’t work:

xpath install.rdf /RDF/Description/em:targetApplication/Description[em:id={ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}]

Output like this:

Query:
/RDF/Description/em:targetApplication/Description[em:id={{ec8030...
.......................................................^^^
Invalid query somewhere around here (I think)

I think it’s because curly brackets “{}” need escaping, so I tried ‘{{..}}’, ‘{…}’… none of them works.

I’m not familiar with xpath or perl at all…

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Try 

    xpath install.rdf '/RDF/Description/em:targetApplication/Description[em:id="{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}"]'

    This doesn’t actually have anything to do with Perl, other than the fact that the xpath utility is written in it. It’s all about bash and XPath.

    To prevent bash from looking at it, put the whole query in single quotes.

    In XPath, strings must be quoted (with either single or double quotes). It’s generally easiest to use double quotes inside the XPath expression, and then put single quotes around it for bash.

    Since you’re searching for

    <em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>

    the condition you want is 

    em:id="{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}"

    You’re getting away with em:minVersion=2.1 because 2.1 looks like a number, so XPath does a numeric comparison. But that won’t work with arbitrary strings.

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