UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am trying to search for a pattern in a file containing xml - When I match the search I want to retrieve all the text within the xml brackets..
Whats the best way to read in data between xml tags in a shell script?

ie..
xml returned which I have in a file now is something like below:
<total>
<mainacc>5500</mainacc>
<BalAccs>

<BalAcc>
<AccId>1</AccId>
<Value>0</Value>
</BalAcc>

<BalAcc>
<AccId>2</AccId>
<Value>0</Value>
</BalAcc>

</BalAccs>
</total>

I need to find the section for mainacc and store that but also in the Balaccs section I need to find the information for the value fields in Accid 1 and 2 but also know that the value belongs to accid1 and accid2 ...


Any help??
I have never parsed xml before and not sure where to start ..

There's almost certainly a more efficient/elegant way of doing this, but the following works for me:

Code:

$ cat ./foo.awk
{
         if ( $0 ~ /<mainacc>/ ) {
            sub( /<mainacc>/, "", $0 )
            sub( /<\/mainacc>/, "", $0 )
            mainacc=$0
            printf( "mainacc: %s\n", $0 )
         }
         if ( $0 ~ /<AccId>/ ) {
            sub( /<AccId>/, "", $0 )
            sub( /<\/AccId>/, "", $0 )
            accid=$0
            printf( "\tAccId: %s", $0 )
         }
         if ( $0 ~ /<Value>/ ) {
            sub( /<Value>/, "", $0 )
            sub( /<\/Value>/, "", $0 )
            value=$0
            printf( "\tValue: %s\n", $0 )
         }
}
$ awk -f ./foo.awk infile
mainacc: 5500
        AccId: 1        Value: 0
        AccId: 2        Value: 0
mainacc: 5501
        AccId: 1        Value: 55555
        AccId: 2        Value: 6
mainacc: 5505
        AccId: 1        Value: 10
        AccId: 2        Value: 100

Cheers
ZB

Setting the awk field separator may help, e.g....

Code:

$ awk -F '[<>]' '/(mainacc|AccId)/ {print $2,$3}' file1
mainacc 5500
AccId 1
AccId 2