Introducing XMLStarlet, an XML star

As we get progressively more used to XML in our Web applications we’re finding that what we need is a whole range of tools to manipulate XML content. Today, I have a really interesting tool to do just that: XMLStarlet, an open source freeware released under the MIT license, which means that the software can be used and distributed in both commercial and non-commercial projects. (More licensing facts.)

XMLStarlet is a command line utility that can:

* Check or validate XML files through a simple well-formedness check, DTD, XSD, or RelaxNG, a schema language for XML.XPath expressions on XML files.XSLT stylesheets to XML documents including EXSLT support and passing parameters to stylesheets.Xinclude.XML c14n canonicalization.PYX format and vice versa.

* Calculate values of

* Search XML files for matches to given XPath expressions.

* Apply

* Query XML documents.

* Modify or edit XML documents.

* Format or “beautify” XML documents.

* Fetch XML documents using http:// or ftp:// URLs

* Browse tree structure of XML documents (similar to the ‘ls’ command).

* Include one XML document into another using

*

* Escape or unescape special XML characters in input text.

* Print a directory as an XML document.

* Convert XML into

The XmlStarlet User’s Guide is available in a descriptive HTML version, as well as in PDF, and plain text. Between these documents, this is a thorough description of the syntax of XMLStarlet commands with enough examples to get you started. There’s also a helpful IBM article on the ins and outs of the program.

This is a powerful tool and even better, it is available for download onto Linux, SunOS and Windows.