Question

Sometimes I need to quickly extract some arbitrary data from XML files to put into a CSV format. What’s your best practices for doing this in the Unix terminal? I would love some code examples, so for instance how can I get the following problem solved?

Example XML input:

<root>     <myel name="Foo" />     <myel name="Bar" /> </root> 

My desired CSV output:

Foo, Bar, 

Answer 1

If you just want the name attributes of any element, here is a quick but incomplete solution.

(Your example text is in the file example)

grep ‘name’ example | cut -d’\” -f2,2 | xargs -I{} echo ‘{},’