What is xpathtool?

Short version: xpath query tool for xml and html.

Long version: swanky frontend to xsltproc which takes an xpath query and content and spits out the results.

Dependencies: xsltproc (comes with libxslt), xmllint (comes with libxml2).

Download

xpathtool-20071102.tar.gz

Usage

--ihtml

Set input format as html.

--otext

Output should be text. Implemented as <xsl:value-of select="." />

--oxml

Output should be xml.

--ohtml

Output should be html.

--indent (default) or --noindent

Set whether or not xml or html output should be depth-based indented.

--stripspace=XXX

Define elements who's content should be space-stripped. Implemented with <xsl:strips-ace>.

--pretty (default) or --nopretty

Pretty print xml and html output by filtering through 'xmllint --format'

Example: Technorati WTF RSS

% GET feeds.technorati.com/wtf | ./xpathtool.sh '//link' | tail -3
http://technorati.com/wtf/we-can-take-our-country-back/2007/05/16/ron-paul-is-standing-up-tot-the-establishment-1
http://technorati.com/wtf/giuliani-is-deluded/2007/05/16/delusional-and-out-of-touch-with-reality-1
http://technorati.com/wtf/macbook/2007/05/16/apples-rule-1

Example: Slashdot article links

Slashdot is worthless. The article writeups are worthless. The comments are worthless. The users are worthless.

Sometimes, the linked content is not. Let's pull out all the links in all the articles on the frontpage:

# slashdot articles are inside the following html element
% xbase="//div[@class='article']//div[@class='intro']/i"
% GET www.slashdot.org | ./xpathtool.sh --ihtml "$xbase//a/@href|$xbase//a/text()"  | paste -d" " - - 
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3807 the world's biggest digital dump
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/google-apps-partner-edition.html turn over their entire email operation to Google
http://apcmag.com/6138/the_dark_side_of_google_apps_for_isps the dark side of Google's offer