Question

Is there a simple way, possibly with open-source command line tools in Linux, to strip all levels beyond a given threshold from a given XML document, regardless of the structure?

Input:

<a att="1">
   <b/>
   <c bat="2">
      <d/>
   </c>
</a>

Output, level=1:

<a att="1"/>

Output, level=2:

<a att="1">
   <b/>
   <c bat="2"/>
</a>

I have tried XPath but was unable to restrict the level.

Answer 1

Very simple in XSLT:

<xsl:template match="*">
  <xsl:if test="count(ancestor::*) &lt;= $level">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
      <xsl:apply-templates/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>