Convert string to xml in shell script?

Question

I have written a script which is fetching data from database.

Now I want to enhance that script to create a xml file with data which is return by database.

How may i convert that string to xml file in shell script.

script.sh

#!/bin/sh
echo 'SELECT TABLE_NAME AS "Table Name", table_rows AS "Quant of Rows", ROUND((data_length + index_length)/1024/1024,2) AS "Total Size Mb" FROM information_schema.TABLES WHERE information_schema.TABLES.table_schema="database_name";' | mysql -u root -pmysql

data getting from database

"Table Name\tQuant of Rows\tTotal Size Mb\ntable_1\t2\t0.02\ntable_2\t1\t0.02\ntable_3\t142\t0.02\ntable_4\t50839\t5.03\ntable_5\t16573\t5.13\ndlr\t0\t0.02\ntable_6\t6\t0.02\ntable_7\t0\t0.03\ntable_8\t2\t0.08\ntable_9\t4\t0.02\n"

I want to write some logic into script which convert this string to xml file.

How may i do that ? What are the preferred way to handle this scenario ?

While it would certainly be possible to do this with a shell script, I would recommend using another scripting language for this, like Perl, Python or Ruby, as all of these have libraries that make constructing XML much easier. — Sven, Mar 22 '11 at 12:12
Please do not [cross-post](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5390788/convert-string-to-xml-in-shell-script). — Dennis Williamson, Mar 23 '11 at 02:50

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 22 '11 at 12:07

You can do this with awk. awk -F\t will tell awk to use the tab character as the field separator. $1 would become Table Name, $2 would become Quant of Rows, and so on. Also, $0 refers to the entire line, while $NF is always the last field.

cat data | awk -F\t '{printf("<xml-tag-1>%s</xml-tag-1>\n<xml-tag-2>%s</xml-tag2>\n", $1, $2 )}'

This will create xml by hand for the first 2 fields.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 22 '11 at 12:56

#!/bin/sh
mysql -u root -pmysql --xml > /home/test/Desktop/temp.xml << eof
SELECT TABLE_NAME AS "Table Name", table_rows AS "Quant of Rows", ROUND((data_length + index_length)/1024/1024,2) AS "Total Size Mb"  FROM information_schema.TABLES WHERE information_schema.TABLES.table_schema='database_name';
eof

Convert string to xml in shell script?

2 Answers2