rix: command-line XML editing and refactoring

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>