I have a large XML, looking like this:
<gender>M</gender>
<last-name>*</last-name>
<profession>2165dda2-dc59-41af-acb5-06d8914c4841</profession>
<first-name>*</first-name>
<mail-confirmation>1</mail-confirmation>
<fax-confirmation>1</fax-confirmation>
I only want to keep the tags. I found a way to search IN the tag, like this:
<profession[^>]*>([^<]*?)</profession>
but how do I search everything outside of it? I tried to just flip it, like:
</profession[^>]*>([^<]*?)<profession>
or
</profession>([^<]*?)<profession[^>]*>
but that won't work.
Strictly you can't parse XML with a regex.
Quick and dirty solution with sed is to grep the lines with profession then replace "profession"
and "/profession" with "" (markup is stripping the < > )
Don't use regular expressions to parse XML. Use an XML parser:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict; use warnings;
use XML::LibXML::Reader;
my $reader = XML::LibXML::Reader->new(IO => \*DATA)
or die "Cannot read from \\*DATA\n";
while ( $reader->read ) {
print $reader->readInnerXml if $reader->localName eq 'profession';
}
$reader->finish;
print $reader->document->toString(1);
__DATA__
<person>
<gender>M</gender>
<last-name>*</last-name>
<profession>2165dda2-dc59-41af-acb5-06d8914c4841</profession>
<first-name>*</first-name>
<mail-confirmation>1</mail-confirmation>
<fax-confirmation>1</fax-confirmation>
</person>
Output:
C:\Temp> t
2165dda2-dc59-41af-acb5-06d8914c4841
See XML::LibXML::Reader.
You might consider using XSL to select the values. For example, creating a comma-separated list of professions from your XML.
<xsl:stylesheet version='2.0' xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform'>
<xsl:output method="text" />
<xsl:template match='/'>
<xsl:for-each select="person">
<xsl:value-of select="profession" /><xsl:text>,</xsl:text>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Notepad++ has an XML plugin that will run XSL against open files.
(Plugins > XML Tools > XSL Transformation)
What about
# Perl
$xml =~ s/^<profession>.*<\/profession>$/<profession><\/profession>/m;
Just make sure to use the multiline modifier.