[ACCEPTED]-strip comments from xml file and pretty-print it-sh

Accepted answer

Score: 25

you can use tidy

$ tidy -quiet -asxml -xml -indent -wrap 1024 --hide-comments 1 tomcat-users.xml
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<tomcat-users>
  <user username="qwerty" password="ytrewq" roles="manager-gui" />
</tomcat-users>

Score: 11

Run your XML through an identity transform XSLT, with an empty 4 template for comments.

All of the XML content, except 3 for the comments, will be passed through 2 to the output.

In order to niecely format 1 the output, set the output @indent="yes":

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>

<!--Match on Attributes, Elements, text nodes, and Processing Instructions-->
<xsl:template match="@*| * | text() | processing-instruction()">
   <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
   </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

<!--Empty template prevents comments from being copied into the output -->
<xsl:template match="comment()"/>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Score: 7

You might want to look at the xmllint tool. It 6 has several options (one of which --format will 5 do a pretty print), but I can't figure out 4 how to remove the comments using this tool.

Also, check 3 out XMLStarlet, a bunch of command line tools to do 2 anything you would want to with xml. Then 1 do:

xml c14n --without-comments # XML file canonicalization w/o comments

EDIT: OP eventually used this line:

xmlstarlet c14n --without-comments old.xml > new.xml

Score: 3

To tidy up something simple like Tomcat's 14 server.xml, I use

sed 's/<!--/\x0<!--/g;s/-->/-->\x0/g' | grep -zv '^<!--' | tr -d '\0' | grep -v "^\s*$"

I.e.

function tidy() {
 echo "$( cat $1 | sed 's/<!--/\x0<!--/g;s/-->/-->\x0/g' | grep -zv '^<!--' | tr -d '\0' | grep -v "^\s*$")"
}

tidy server.xml

... will print the 13 xml without comments.

NOTE: while it works 12 reasonably well for simple things, it will 11 fail with certain CDATA blocks and some 10 other situations. Only use it for controlled 9 xml scripts that have no need and will never 8 need to escape a single <-- or --> anywhere!

First 7 sed marks comment's start and stop with 6 0x0 characters, then grep with -z treats 0x0 5 as the only line delimiter, searches for 4 lines starting with comment, it's -v inverts 3 the filter, leaving only meaningful lines. Finally, tr -d\0` deletes 2 all these 0x0, and to polish it up, another 1 grep removes empty lines: voila.

Source: stackoverflow.com

[ACCEPTED]-strip comments from xml file and pretty-print it-sh

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