Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi: I've just joined the forum so forgive me if I'm posting this in the wrong place.

I'm looking for a (relatively) painless way to get some data from a XML file (my browser history in this case), and write the output to a plain text file. So, for example, if the relevant section of XML looked like this:

<item>
<name>Google</name>
<url>http://www.google.com</url>
</item>

Then the output would look like this (in a plain text file):

"Google
http://www.google.com"

I ought to say that the XML files I'm going to be working with have more than one entry (or item, as I've called it in my example), so I need to be able to work with that and fetch the details of each item, then write these details to a separate text file for each item. As is hopefully clear, I'm trying to separate the XML down into something a little simpler.

I have very little experience programming in unix, so I'm really looking for a pretty ready-made solution, or some step-by-step advice if someone has the time or inclination to give it! As it stands this is very much a work in progress, and I'm still looking into different ways of achieving my goal. Any help/advice would be appreciated! Cheers.

Using newLisp:

Code:

(set 'str (read-file (last (main-args))))
(xml-type-tags nil nil nil nil)
(set 'xml-list (first (xml-parse str (+ 1 2 4))))
(dolist (stuff xml-list)
  (and (= "item" (first stuff))
    (println (lookup "name" stuff))
    (println (lookup "url" stuff))))
(exit)

This input

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<DATABASE name="example.xml">
<item>
<name>Google</name>
<url>http://www.google.com</url>
</item>
<item>
<name>Fling</name>
<url>http://www.fling.com</url>
</item>
</DATABASE>

results in this output:

Code:

Google
http://www.google.com
Fling
http://www.fling.com

Invoke the program in this way:

Code:

newlisp xml.lsp log.xml

For your input here is a sed solution. The sed one-liner might look nasty.

Code:

[/tmp]$ echo "<item>
<name>Google</name>
<url>http://www.google.com</url>
</item>" | sed -n -e "s_<[^>]*>\([^<>]*\)<[^>]*>_\1_p"
Google
http://www.google.com
[/tmp]$

Another way...

Code:

awk -F '[<>]' '$2=="item",$2=="/item"{if($2~/^(name|url)$/)print $3}' log.xml