rix makes it very easy to edit multiple XML files at once. You can use XPath to select just the nodes you want to edit, and supply a list of files to work on. With rix you can:
- set the value of elements and attributes
- add elements and attributes
- remove elements and attributes
- rename elements and attributes
- trim elements and attributes
- count elements and attributes
- pretty print elements and attributes
gem install rix
To see a list of available commands, run:
$ rix help commands
This will currently output the following:
Available commands:
add-element
add-attribute
set
remove
rename
trim
count
show
help
To set the value of all date elements:
$ rix set --value 26-01-2012 //date *.xml
When using set, values can be cleared by omitting the value option:
$ rix set //@secret *.xml
To add a new td element to every tr element in all HTML files in the current directory, run:
$ rix add-element --name td //tr *.html
To add a @foo attribute with the value 'bar' to every element in every XML file in the current directory, run:
$ rix add-attribute --name foo --value bar "//*" *.xml
To remove all font elements from all HTML files in the current directory and below, run:
$ rix remove //font **/*.html
The rename command renames all selected elements and attributes.
$ rix rename //h2 index.html --name h1
The values of elements and attributes can be trimmed, so ' foo ' becomes 'foo'. Trimming all text nodes is as easy as:
$ rix trim "//text()" *.xml
Two commands are useful when run before an editing command: count and show.
The count command gives the number of selected nodes (elements, attributes etc.) for every file. For example:
$ rix count //p *.html
might give an output such as this:
public/404.html: 2
public/422.html: 1
public/500.html: 3
show gives a pretty-printed output of all selected nodes:
$ rix show //ul index.html
will result in something like this:
<ul id="menu">
<li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="/news">News</a></li>
<li><a href="/jobs">Jobs</a></li>
<li><a href="/about">About</a></li>
</ul>