bash - Extraction of data from a simple XML file

Question

I've a XML file with the contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<job xmlns="http://www.sample.com/">programming</job>

I need a way to extract what is in the <job..> </job> tags, programmin in this case. This should be done on linux command prompt, using grep/sed/awk.

Answer 1

Do you really have to use only those tools? They're not designed for XML processing, and although it's possible to get something that works OK most of the time, it will fail on edge cases, like encoding, line breaks, etc.

I recommend xml_grep:

xml_grep 'job' jobs.xml --text_only

Which gives the output:

programming

On ubuntu/debian, xml_grep is in the xml-twig-tools package.