Recently, changes from the xmlgawk project have been integrated into GNU awk, and xmlgawk has been renamed to gawkextlib. With both a recent (post-4.0.70) gawk and gawkextlib built and installed correctly, you can write simple XML parsing scripts using gawk.

For example, let’s say you would like to generate a list of disk image files associated with a KVM virtual instance. You can use the virsh dumpxml command to get output like the following:

<devices>
  <emulator>/usr/bin/qemu-kvm</emulator>
  <disk type='file' device='disk'>
    <driver name='qemu' type='qcow2'/>
    <source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images/client.qcow2'/>
    <target dev='sda' bus='ide'/>
    <alias name='ide0-0-0'/>
    <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' unit='0'/>
  </disk>
 ...
</devices>

You could then write code similar to the following to extract the relevant information:

@load "xml"

XMLSTARTELEM == "disk"  {
        in_disk=1
        disk_file=""
        disk_target=""
}

in_disk == 1 && XMLSTARTELEM == "source" {
        disk_file=XMLATTR["file"]
}

in_disk == 1 && XMLSTARTELEM == "target" {
        disk_target=XMLATTR["dev"]
}

XMLENDELEM == "disk"    {
        in_disk=0
        print disk_target, disk_file
}

Given the sample input above, the script will produce the following output:

sda /var/lib/libvirt/images/client.qcow2

The xml extension for gawk populates a number of variables that can be used in your scripts:

  • XMLSTARTELEM marks the start of a new element (and is set to the name of that element).
  • XMLATTR is available when XMLSTARTELEM is set and contains the element attributes.
  • XMLENDELEM marks the end of an element (and is set to the name of the element).

There are other variables available, but with this basic set is becomes easy to extract information from XML documents.