Command-line XML and HTML beautifier and content extractor.
- Syntax highlighting
- Automatic indentation and formatting
- Automatic pagination
- Node content extraction
Format an XML file and highlight the syntax:
xq test/data/xml/unformatted.xml
xq also accepts input through stdin:
curl -s https://www.w3schools.com/xml/note.xml | xq
HTML content can be formatted and highlighted as well (using -m flag):
xq -m test/data/html/formatted.html
It is possible to extract the content using XPath query language.
-x parameter accepts XPath expression.
Extract the text content of all nodes with city name:
cat test/data/xml/unformatted.xml | xq -x //city
Extract the value of attribute named status and belonging to user:
cat test/data/xml/unformatted.xml | xq -x /user/@status
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPath for details.
It is possible to use CSS selector to extract the content as well:
cat test/data/html/unformatted.html | xq -q "body > p"
Extract an attribute value instead of node content additional option --attr (-a) can be used:
cat test/data/html/unformatted.html | xq -q "head > script" -a "src"
Extract part of HTML with tags (not only text content) using CSS selector:
cat test/data/html/unformatted.html | xq -n -q "head"
Output the result as JSON:
cat test/data/xml/unformatted.xml | xq -j
This will output the result in JSON format, preserving the XML structure. The JSON output will be an object where:
- XML elements become object keys
- Attributes are prefixed with "@"
- Text content is stored under "#text" if the element has attributes or child elements
- Repeated elements are automatically converted to arrays
- Elements with only text content are represented as strings
The preferable ways to install the utility are described below.
For macOS, via Homebrew:
brew install xq
For macOS, via MacPorts:
sudo port install xq
For Linux using custom installer:
curl -sSL https://bit.ly/install-xq | sudo bash
For Ubuntu 22.10 or higher via package manager:
apt-get install xq
For Fedora via package manager:
dnf install xq
A more detailed list of Linux distros that package the xq utility can be found here:
https://repology.org/project/xq-sibprogrammer/versions
If you have Go toolchain installed, you can use the following command to install xq:
go install github.com/sibprogrammer/xq@latest
You can play with the xq utility using the Dockerized environment:
docker-compose run --rm xq
xq /opt/examples/xml/unformatted.xml