xml_grep get attribute from element

Question

Is it possible (and if so, how) with xml_grep to get the value of a specific attribute from a specific element? I only seem to be able to output the information between tags.

example:

    <eid>
       <identity nationalnumber="13021912354" dateofbirth="20130219" gender="male">
          <name>Menten</name>
          <firstname>Kasper</firstname>
          <middlenames>Marie J</middlenames>
          <nationality>Belg</nationality>
          <placeofbirth>Sint-Truiden</placeofbirth>
          <photo>base64-string</photo>
       </identity>
    </eid>

output the value (in this case: 13021912354) of the 'nationalnumber'-attribute from the 'identity'-element

Gilles Quénot · Accepted Answer · 2016-10-17 13:59:04Z

9

With xmllint :

xmllint --xpath 'string(//identity/@nationalnumber)' file.xml

For debian distro (or derivatives) xmllint is part of the libxml2-utils package and can be installed so:

apt-get install libxml2-utils

edited Oct 17, 2016 at 13:59

answered Feb 19, 2013 at 14:06

Gilles Quénot

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2 Comments

Bruno Bieri Over a year ago

For me it only worked when I used the answer given here: stackoverflow.com/a/11906002/1306012

Khurshid Alam Over a year ago

@gilles-quenot For multiple <eid>s in a single file, if I want to extract dateofbirth for particular nationalnumber.....how should I achieve that?

Robert Boyd · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-21 15:37:01Z

2

The version of xmllint that I have installed on RHEL6.3 doesn't seem to have this magic --xpath option. What version of xmllint provides support for this option?

answered Feb 21, 2013 at 15:37

Robert Boyd

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1 Comment

sarkasper Over a year ago

xmllint: using libxml version 20800

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