xq

Command line XML beautifier and content extractor. Similar to jq.

Features

• Syntax highlighting
• Automatic indentation
• Automatic pagination
• Node content extraction

Usage

Format an XML file and highlight the syntax:

xq test/data/unformatted.xml

xq also accepts input through stdin:

curl -s https://www.w3schools.com/xml/note.xml | xq

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/unformatted.xml | xq -x //city

Extract the value of attribute named status and belonging to user:

cat test/data/unformatted.xml | xq -x /user/@status

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPath for details.

Installation

A simple way to install the utility is to use the curl and bash installer.

For macOS:

curl -sSL https://bit.ly/install-xq | bash

For Linux:

curl -sSL https://bit.ly/install-xq | sudo bash

For Fedora via package manager:

dnf install xq

If you have Go toolchain installed, you can use the following command to install xq:

go install github.com/sibprogrammer/xq@latest