xpath-cli

xpath-cli provides a single command, xpath, that evaluates XPath expressions against XML or HTML input. It is a small, focused wrapper around the battle-tested libxml2 library, bringing the full power of XPath 1.0 to the terminal in a composable, pipe-friendly form.

It pairs naturally with its sibling tool grex, which flattens XML into a greppable line-oriented format.

Features

• XPath 1.0 — full expression support backed by libxml2
• HTML support — parses real-world HTML documents, not just well-formed XML
• Pipe-friendly — reads from stdin or a file; outputs one result per line
• Composable — combine with curl, grep, sed, and other UNIX tools naturally

Installation

cargo install xpath-cli

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/jake-low/xpath-cli
cd xpath-cli
cargo install --path .

Note: xpath-cli depends on libxml2. On most Linux systems it is already present. On macOS, install it with brew install libxml2.

If you need to install the build dependency explicitly:

# Debian / Ubuntu
apt install libxml2-dev

# Fedora
dnf install libxml2-devel

Usage

# Evaluate an XPath expression on a local XML file
xpath '//book/title/text()' library.xml

# Works equally well on HTML — fetch a Wikipedia page and extract the title
curl -sL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random | xpath '//h1/span/text()'

# Extract an XML attribute from a remote API response
curl -sL https://osm.org/api/0.6/changeset/157745397 \
  | xpath '//changeset/tag[@k = "comment"]/@v'

# Count nodes matching a predicate
curl -sL https://example.com/feed.xml \
  | xpath 'count(//item)'

# Read from stdin explicitly
cat sitemap.xml | xpath '//url/loc/text()'

Practical examples

# Extract all hyperlinks from an HTML page
curl -sL https://example.com | xpath '//a/@href'

# Pull every price out of a product feed
xpath '//product[@available="true"]/price/text()' catalog.xml

# Check the value of a specific attribute
xpath '//configuration/database/@host' config.xml

# List all XML namespaces declared in a document
xpath '//namespace::*' document.xml

Relationship to grex

xpath-cli and grex are complementary tools by the same author. Use grex to flatten XML into a line-oriented format for use with grep, awk, and diff; use xpath when you want to query the document with a precise XPath expression and extract specific values directly.

# Two ways to get the same data
xpath '//menu/pizza/@price' pizzeria.xml

grex pizzeria.xml | grep '@price'