Extracting and dumping elements using xmlstarlet

Question

I am looking for a way to extract and print an element from my xml using xmlstarlet; for example if my xml is

Answer 1

Using the "-c" (copy) option, should achieve what you're after:

xmlstarlet sel -t -c "/bookstore/book[price=29.99]" books.xml


  
  29.99

You can watch the XSLT generated internally in xmlstarlet by adding the global "-C" switch after "sel". This shows how the copy option results in an xslt copy-of construct:

...

  

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This results in namespace nodes, child nodes, and attributes nodes being included, cf. the XSLT spec (see w3schools summary).