XMLStarlet 1.0.1 review

XMLStarlet is a set of command line utilities (tools) which can be used to transform, query, validate, and edit XML documents and fil

License: Freeware File size: 514K Developer: mgrouch

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XMLStarlet is a set of command line utilities (tools) which can be used to transform, query, validate, and edit XML documents and files using simple set of shell commands in similar way it is done for plain text files using UNIX grep, sed, awk, diff, patch, join, etc commands.

This set of command line utilities can be used by those who deal with many XML documents on UNIX shell command prompt as well as for automated XML processing with shell scripts.

Here are some key features of "XMLStarlet":
Check or validate XML files (simple well-formedness check, DTD, XSD, RelaxNG)
Calculate values of XPath expressions on XML files (such as running sums, etc)
Search XML files for matches to given XPath expressions
Apply XSLT stylesheets to XML documents (including EXSLT support, and passing parameters to stylesheets)
Query XML documents (ex. query for value of some elements of attributes, sorting, etc)
Modify or edit XML documents (ex. delete some elements)
Format or "beautify" XML documents (as changing indentation, etc)
Fetch XML documents using http:// or ftp:// URLs
Browse tree structure of XML documents (in similar way to 'ls' command for directories)
Include one XML document into another using XInclude
XML c14n canonicalization
Escape/unescape special XML characters in input text
Print directory as XML document
Convert XML into PYX format (based on ESIS - ISO 8879), and vice versa


XMLStarlet command line utility is written in C and uses libxml2 and libxslt from http://xmlsoft.org/.
Implementation of extensive choice of options for XMLStarlet utility was only possible because of rich feature set of libxml2 and libxslt (many thanks to the developers of those libraries for great work).

'diff' and 'patch' options are not currently implemented. Other features need some work too. Please, send an email to the project administrator (see http://sourceforge.net/projects/xmlstar/) if you wish to help.

XMLStarlet is linked statically to both libxml2 and libxslt, so generally all you need to process XML documents is one executable file. To run XmlStarlet utility you can simple type 'xml' on command line and see list of options available.

XMLStarlet is open source freeware under MIT license which allows free use and distribution for both commercial and non-commercial projects.