Ownership of this project has been transferred to @cmprescott/ansible-xml
Please direct all contributions to the new location.
thanks!
Ansible module for manipulating bits and pieces of XML files and strings.
- Pythons bindings to
libxml
(usually in a package calledpython-lxml
, install withsudo apt-get install python-lxml
orsudo yum install python-lxml
).
- This software is available under the terms of the GPLv2 license.
- Hi there, we have unit tests!
"XPath uses path expressions to select nodes or node-sets in an XML document. The node is selected by following a path or steps."
Basically, it's a syntax which allows you to select a specific, or collection, of elements or attributes in an XML file.
Learn more at the Mozilla Developer Network
Also included in this repository are Unittests. Reference these, in addition to the Travis-CI configuration, if you need some more examples.
Given:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<business type="bar">
<name>Tasty Beverage Co.</name>
<beers>
<beer>Rochefort 10</beer>
<beer>St. Bernardus Abbot 12</beer>
<beer>Schlitz</beer>
</beers>
<rating subjective="true">10</rating>
<website>
<mobilefriendly />
<address>http://tastybeverageco.com</address>
</website>
</business>
Remove the subjective
attribute of the rating element:
xml: file=/foo/bar.xml xpath=/business/rating/@subjective ensure=absent
Set the rating to 11
xml: file=/foo/bar.xml xpath=/business/rating value=11
Get count of beers nodes
xml: file=/foo/bar.xml xpath=/business/beers/beer count=true
register: hits
debug: var=hits.count
Add a phonenumber
element to the business
element Implicit
mkdir -p
behavior where applicable (parent xml nodes created
automatically)
xml: file=/foo/bar.xml xpath=/business/phonenumber value=555-555-1234
Add several more beers to the beers element, assuming a vars.yaml file with:
new_beers:
- beer: "Old Rasputin"
- beer: "Old Motor Oil"
- beer: "Old Curmudgeon"
Then the playbook syntax would look like this:
xml: file=/foo/bar.xml xpath=/business/beers add_children={{ new_beers }}
The same, but do it inline
xml:
file: /foo/bar.xml
xpath: /business/beers
add_children:
- beer: "Old Rasputin"
- beer: "Old Motor Oil"
- beer: "Old Curmudgeon"
Add a validxhtml
element to the website
element. Note that
ensure
is present
by default, and value
defaults to
null
for elements. The result is something like
<website><validxhtml />...</website>
xml: file=/foo/bar.xml xpath=/business/website/validxhtml
Add an empty validatedon
attribute to the validxhtml
element. This actually makes the last example redundant because of the
implicit parent-node creation behavior. The result is something like
<website><validxhtml validatedon='' />...</website>
xml: file=/foo/bar.xml xpath=/business/website/validxhtml/@validatedon
(1/2) Remove all children from the website element:
xml: file=/foo/bar.xml xpath=/business/website/* ensure=absent
(2/2) Remove all children from the website element:
xml:
file: /foo/bar.xml
xpath: /business/website
children: []
Question? If You have <beers><child01 /><child02 /></beers>
What happens if you say:
xml: file=/foo/bar.xml xpath=/beers
value
defaults to an element, so then this would erase the
children elements.