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Full Discussion: 'for LINE in $(cat file)' breaking at spaces, not just newlines
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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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

xml_pp

XML_PP(1p)						User Contributed Perl Documentation						XML_PP(1p)

NAME

       xml_pp - xml pretty-printer

SYNOPSYS

       xml_pp [options] [<files>]

DESCRIPTION

       XML pretty printer using XML::Twig

OPTIONS

       -i[<extension>]
	   edits the file(s) in place, if an extension is provided (no space between "-i" and the extension) then the original file is backed-up
	   with that extension

	   The rules for the extension are the same as Perl's (see perldoc perlrun): if the extension includes no "*" then it is appended to the
	   original file name, If the extension does contain one or more "*" characters, then each "*" is replaced with the current filename.

       -s <style>
	   the style to use for pretty printing: none, nsgmls, nice, indented, record, or record_c (see XML::Twig docs for the exact description
	   of those styles), 'indented' by default

       -p <tag(s)>
	   preserves white spaces in tags. You can use several "-p" options or quote the tags if you need more than one

       -e <encoding>
	   use XML::Twig output_encoding (based on Text::Iconv or Unicode::Map8 and Unicode::String) to set the output encoding. By default the
	   original encoding is preserved.

	   If this option is used the XML declaration is updated (and created if there was none).

	   Make sure that the encoding is supported by the parser you use if you want to be able to process the pretty_printed file (XML::Parser
	   does not support 'latin1' for example, you have to use 'iso-8859-1')

       -l  loads the documents in memory instead of outputing them as they are being parsed.

	   This prevents a bug (see BUGS) but uses more memory

       -f <file>
	   read the list of files to process from <file>, one per line

       -v  verbose (list the current file being processed)

       --  stop argument processing (to process files that start with -)

       -h  display help

EXAMPLES

	 xml_pp foo.xml > foo_pp.xml	       # pretty print foo.xml
	 xml_pp < foo.xml > foo_pp.xml	       # pretty print from standard input

	 xml_pp -v -i.bak *.xml 	       # pretty print .xml files, with backups
	 xml_pp -v -i'orig_*' *.xml	       # backups are named orig_<filename>

	 xml_pp -i -p pre foo.xhtml	       # preserve spaces in pre tags

	 xml_pp -i.bak -p 'pre code' foo.xml   # preserve spaces in pre and code tags
	 xml_pp -i.bak -p pre -p code foo.xml  # same

	 xml_pp -i -s record mydb_export.xml   # pretty print using the record style

	 xml_pp -e utf8 -i foo.xml	       # output will be in utf8
	 xml_pp -e iso-8859-1 -i foo.xml       # output will be in iso-8859-1

	 xml_pp -v -i.bak -f lof	       # pretty print in place files from lof

	 xml_pp -- -i.xml		       # pretty print the -i.xml file

	 xml_pp -l foo.xml		       # loads the entire file in memory
					       # before pretty printing it

	 xml_pp -h			       # display help

BUGS

       Elements with mixed content that start with an embedded element get an extra 


	 <elt><b>b</b>toto<b>bold</b></elt>

       will be output as

	 <elt>
	   <b>b</b>toto<b>bold</b></elt>

       Using the "-l" option solves this bug (but uses more memory)

TODO

       update XML::Twig to use Encode with perl 5.8.0

AUTHOR

       Michel Rodriguez <mirod@xmltwig.com>

perl v5.12.4							    2011-05-18								XML_PP(1p)
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