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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting 'for LINE in $(cat file)' breaking at spaces, not just newlines Post 302548595 by natedawg1013 on Thursday 18th of August 2011 09:23:31 PM
Old 08-18-2011
'for LINE in $(cat file)' breaking at spaces, not just newlines

Hello. I'm making a (hopefully) simple shell script xml parser that outputs a file I can grep for information. I am writing it because I have yet to find a command line utility that can do this. If you know of one, please just stop now and tell me about it. Even better would be one I can input the XML file and path to the data (below example would be "foo/bar/c") and get the value. I know this can easily be done in python, but I have no experience in that and I want to make it part of a bigger program.

My goal, if writing the full parser, is to have the input file, for example,
Code:
<foo a="1">
    <bar b="2" c="Some string">
    </bar>
</foo>

output something like
Code:
foo.a="1"
foo.bar.b="2"
foo.bar.c="Some string"

The way I thought about doing this was
Code:
for LINE in $(cat file.xml)
do
if [ -n "$(echo $LINE | grep '<.*>' | grep -ve '<\/.*>')"

followed by how to parse it if it's an open tag <tag> and an if statement for ending tags </tag>.

NOW HERE'S THE PROBLEM:
"cat file.xml" works perfectly in terminal, but when using it in a for loop, assigning it to an array, or anything else, it breaks at spaces and newlines, not just newlines thus if I echoed $LINE in the for loop, the output would be
Code:
<foo
a="1">
<bar
b="2"
c="some
string">
</bar>
<foo>

which works fine for numeric values, but some some of my values are strings with spaces in their data which breaks the code since the value is split in half.

How can I get $LINE to be the full line, not just what's between two spaces? Or what command line utility could extract a piece of information from an XML file?
 

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GZEXE(1)						      General Commands Manual							  GZEXE(1)

NAME
gzexe - compress executable files in place SYNOPSIS
gzexe [ name ... ] DESCRIPTION
The gzexe utility allows you to compress executables in place and have them automatically uncompress and execute when you run them (at a penalty in performance). For example if you execute ``gzexe /bin/cat'' it will create the following two files: -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 9644 Feb 11 11:16 /bin/cat -r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 24576 Nov 23 13:21 /bin/cat~ /bin/cat~ is the original file and /bin/cat is the self-uncompressing executable file. You can remove /bin/cat~ once you are sure that /bin/cat works properly. This utility is most useful on systems with very small disks. OPTIONS
-d Decompress the given executables instead of compressing them. SEE ALSO
gzip(1), znew(1), zmore(1), zcmp(1), zforce(1) CAVEATS
The compressed executable is a shell script. This may create some security holes. In particular, the compressed executable relies on the PATH environment variable to find gzip and some other utilities (tail, chmod, ln, sleep). BUGS
gzexe attempts to retain the original file attributes on the compressed executable, but you may have to fix them manually in some cases, using chmod or chown. GZEXE(1)
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