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Is there a command line command or utility I can use to show only the tag structure of an xml document? I looked at xmllint but I didn't see a switch to do it. For a structure like 

<tag1><tag2><tag2-5>value1</tag2-5><tag3>value2</tag3></tag2></tag1>

I want to see

<tag1><tag2><tag2-5></tag2-5><tag3></tag3></tag2></tag1>
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Is it always that trivial? Will you have attributes on the tags? – Michael Mrozek♦ Aug 22 '12 at 20:58
Yeah, it is always that trivial. I'm not worried about the properties. There is a lot of actual data that I don't need to see, I just need the tag names to build xpath expressions. – user394 Aug 22 '12 at 21:27

1 Answer

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I think (but am not at all sure) that you can get away with just stripping out the characters between > and < globally:

sed 's/>[^<]*</></g' /path/to/file.xml
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This catches simple cases, but not <foo>hello↲world</foo> where ↲ is a newline. Nor CDATA (if you have this, you need a real HTML parser). – Gilles Aug 23 '12 at 0:00
Crap :S The content data I want to filter out is a lot of text with newlines :( – user394 Aug 23 '12 at 16:21

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