UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

It would seem that you would be much more likely to get what you want if you process the contents of your XML file directly instead of reading it into a variable and then echoing those contents into sed.

You are asking us to make lots of guesses about what you are doing since you haven't shown us the input file that you are hoping will be translated to the output you say you want in post #5 in this thread. And the pseudo-code in post #5 doesn't really help because it contains a syntax error (i.e., there is no for i to splitcount command in any shell command language I've seen. Please show us the contents of the file (in CODE tags) you want to process to produce the output shown in post #5.

What shell are you using?

What operating system are you using? (Note that the standards say that the results are unspecified if the input file you feed into sed is not a text file. Using echo to convert the contents of a file into a single line may exceed the line length allowed in a text file depending on what operating system and what version of sed on that operating system you're using.)