Modify multiple lines of an XML file using command line

Question

Looking at text below, how do I go about replacing multiple lines of text?

<Model500>
ABC
BCD 
CDE
</Model500>
<Model500>
123
234
345
</Model500>

The output could be like below

<Model500>
AAA
BBB 
CCC
</Model500>
<Model500>
111
333
555
</Model500>

I would like to accomplish this with sed but any command line utility that works with Bash will work. Should I be using a loop to accomplish this?

Answer 1

Use a proper xmltool, in shell, xmlstarlet is a good one :

xmlstarlet edit -L -u "//Model500[1]"  -v "AAA                                                                
BBB
CCC" file.xml

xmlstarlet edit -L -u "//Model500[2]" -v "111                                                               
333
555" file.xml


cat file.xml

The expression //Model500[2] is a Xpath expression

NOTE ¹

you need to enclose your xml with a tag like :

<root>
...
</root>

to be XML valid. I hope you cutted the XML file for the purpose of your question.

NOTE ²

You can also use python, perl, ruby etc... and a proper xml lib.

In perl :

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use XML::Simple;

my $xml_file = 'file.xml';

my $xml = XMLin(
    $xml_file,
    KeepRoot => 1,
    ForceArray => 1,
);

$xml->{root}->[0]->{Model500}->[0] = "AAA\nBBB\nCCC\n";
$xml->{root}->[0]->{Model500}->[1] = "111\n222\n333\n";

XMLout(
    $xml,
    KeepRoot => 1,
    NoAttr => 1,
    OutputFile => $xml_file,
);