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I have a collection of XML files in a standard format that I'd like to search to see if they match two strings.

Here is the idea:

<ELEMENT1>Dave</ELEMENT>
<DON'TCARE1>Blaa</DON'TCARE2>
<DON'TCARE2>Blaa2</DON'TCARE2>
<ELEMENT2>History</ELEMENT2>

How can I match the content of ELEMENT1 and ELEMENT2 with egrep and return the filename that contains them?

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You should first read this to realize how bad it is to use regexps to parse HTML or XML : stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/…. To look for an element in a XML file, use an XPath expression instead. –  lgeorget Mar 7 '14 at 12:43
    
Shouldn't it be </ELEMENT1> instead of </ELEMENT> above? –  Stéphane Chazelas Mar 7 '14 at 12:48

2 Answers 2

up vote 3 down vote accepted

With recent GNU grep built with recent PCRE:

grep -Po '<(ELEMENT[12]>)\K.*?(?=</\1)'
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up vote 2 down vote

The following XQuery should give you the desired output :

for $x in (/content/element1,/content/element2)
return $x/text()

For example, with an XQuery interpreter such as XQilla and an input file like

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<content>
   <element1>truc</element1>
   <dontcare>blah</dontcare>
   <dontcare>blah</dontcare>
   <element2>truc2</element2>
   <dontcare>blah</dontcare>
   <dontcare>blah</dontcare>
</content>

xqilla -i 1.xml 1.query outputs

truc
truc2

For your example, regexps might be sufficient but in the general case it's a bad idea to use them for XML parsing because XML is not a regular language (i.e. a language parsable with regular expressions).

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