On 03/19/2021 12:40 PM, Fabian Arrotin wrote: > On 18/03/2021 22:08, H wrote: >> On 03/18/2021 04:30 PM, Paul Heinlein wrote: >>> On Thu, 18 Mar 2021, H wrote: >>> >>>> I have a challenge I am interested in getting feedback on. >>>> >>>> I will on a regular basis download a series of data files from the web >>>> where the data is in XML-format. The format is known in advance but is >>>> different between the various data files. I then plan to extract the >>>> various data items ("elements?") from each data file, do some light >>>> formatting and then save desired parts of each original data file as a >>>> formatted CSV-file for later importing into a database. >>>> >>>> As the plan is to use a bash shell script using curl to get the files, I >>>> have begun looking at external XML parsers that I can call from my script, >>>> perhaps specify which elements I want, get the data back in some kind of >>>> bash data structure and finally format and save as CSV-files. >>>> >>>> There seems to be a number of XML parsers available but perhaps someone on >>>> the list has a recommendation for which one might suit my needs best? I >>>> should add that I am running CentOS 7. >>> Will you be using an XSLT stylesheet to do the work? There's a somewhat >>> steep learning curve, but in my experience it's the most reliable method >>> for parsing XML except in the very simplest of cases. >>> >>> In that case, the libxslt stuff may be what you want: >>> >>> http://xmlsoft.org/libxslt/ >>> >>> The command-line tool is xsltproc. >>> >>> Again, it's not easy to use, but once you've built a toolchain, it will be >>> reliable and fairly easy to modify if the source XML schema change. >>> >> I just checked and I cannot see that the organization publishing these data >> files offer any XSLT stylesheet. IOW, I am, perhaps incorrectly, assuming >> that the publisher of the data would be one with said stylesheet. (Although >> perhaps that is something an end-user could put together as well??) >> >> Although the data format of each data series is unique, it is simple and >> could conceivably be parsed using grep but I am looking for a more >> "forward-looking" solution for other applications in the future. >> >> If XSLT stylesheets are not available - would you suggest another tool? Or, >> would you suggest I design sheets, presumably one for for each data series? >> > I used in the past xmlstarlet (available in epel) for quick parsing from > within bash scripts. > For something more robust, maybe switch to python ? (ymmv) > I wanted to do this in bash and decided on calling xsltproc while investing in writing an XSLT stylesheet for each data file format.
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