Rename XML elements to a sequence

Question

I was looking at a possible XML-based solution to another question. I'm aware of its accepted answer, which offers sed and python solutions.

The given XML fragment is:

<Names>
    <Name>Luigi</Name>
    <Name>Mario</Name>
    <Name>Peach</Name>
</Names>

and the requirement is to change the <Name/> element names to a sequence <Name1/>, <Name2/>, <Name3/>, etc.

Using xmlstarlet I can rename the <Name/> element values to an fixed value with something like this

xmlstarlet ed -u '//Name' -v 'Another' names.xml

<Names>
  <Another>Luigi</Another>
  <Another>Mario</Another>
  <Another>Peach</Another>
</Names>

And I can even change the element values to an expression with -x (--expr).

But for editing element names themselves there is no -x (--expr) option as an alternative to the -v (--value) option, so I cannot use something like this:

xmlstarlet ed -u '//Name' -x 'concat(., position())' names.xml

Using an XML-aware tool such as xmlstarlet, is it possible to transform the input XML to differentiate the <Name/> elements like this, and if so, how?

<Names>
    <Name1>Luigi</Name1>
    <Name2>Mario</Name2>
    <Name3>Peach</Name3>
</Names>

Answer 1

My experience with XML command-line tools has left me with the feeling that there's a lot to be desired. Almost without fail I find myself giving up and just using Python. That said, I think I have an XQuery solution to this problem that works with the basex utility. Here is the XQuery expression:

<!-- xml_rename_sequence.xquery -->
for $name at $position in doc('names.xml')//Name
return rename node $name as concat(name($name),$position)

And here is the XML data file:

<!-- names.xml -->
<Names>
    <Name>Luigi</Name>
    <Name>Mario</Name>
    <Name>Peach</Name>
</Names>

Here is how we run the script (it modifies the file in-place):

basex -u xml_rename_sequence.xquery

And here is the updated data file:

<!-- names.xml -->
<Names>
  <Name1>Luigi</Name1>
  <Name2>Mario</Name2>
  <Name3>Peach</Name3>
</Names>

I also tried using the following tools (without success):

• xqilla

• xmlstarlet

Here were some posts I found regarding incrementing a counter in XQuery:

• XQuery counters inside a for

• Updating counter in XQuery

• xquery - how to increment a counter variable within a for loop/ how to convert array of string values into node

And here were some other references I used:

• BaseX: XQuery Update

• XQuery Update for the impatient

• XQuery Update queries in BaseX are succesful, but no changes are written to the file