Turning standard output hyphen into a single command

Question

I am working with scripts that output xml and I am using xmllint to format the output. Xmllint requires a source argument, so I use the hyphen to pipe standard output to it:

$> script.php source.txt | xmllint --format - > nice_output.xml

Since I run these scripts quite a bit, I would like to turn the xmllint --format - part into a single command that I can pipe into, but I am not sure how to even start. I would like to do this:

$> script.php source.txt | nicexml > nice_output.xml

Where nicexml is my custom command/alias. How do I do this?

Answer 1

alias version

alias nicexml="xmllint --format -"

bash function

function nicexml() { xmllint --format "${@:--}"; }

• Default input is stdin
• Allows also alternative input source and options.

Answer 2

You could define a shell variable nicexml="xmllint --format -" and then use it as $nicexml.