Insert a multiline string into another string

Question

I need to insert lines into an xml file :

Insert

  <one>
  </one>

into

<tags>
</tags>

To obtain

<tags>
  <one>
  </one>
</tags>

I tried this:

sed "s#\\(< /tags>\\)#${multiline_string}\1#"

but it loses the indentation.

Answer 1

As Mat said, indentation (and whitespace in general) is not important in XML files. This:

<one><tags></tags></one>

Is exactly equivalent to:

<one>
 <tags>
 </tags>
</one>

But this will work while preserving indentation:

$ cat myfile.xml
<tags>
</tags>
$ sed '/<one>/ a\
  <tags>\
  </tags>
' myfile.xml > newfile.xml
$ cat newfile.xml
<one>
  <tags>
  </tags>
</one>

...but if you're working with XML, you might want to think about using a higher-level language that can actually parse XML and manipulate the tree programatically.

Answer 2

The following is a mod to the code you show in the question.

Note that $'\n' is a ksh (also supported by bash and zsh) way to make a newline char, so adjust as needed if you are using another shell.

sed "s|\(</tags>\)|${multiline_string//$'\n'/\n}\1|g"

The trailing g is to cater for situations where you may have </tags> occurring more than once on a line.. It seems that it isn't needed for your xml, but it works either way.