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Edit XML Namespaces with sed

Even if you are a high level programing language user, you sometimes have to use some good old tools to gain some productivity. Sed is one of those tools that might come to be handy.

I recently needed to change the xmlns attribute of a lot of XML/XSL files and doing it file by file would have been a real mess. So I wrote this little piece of script shell:

#! /bin/sh
 
NAMESPACE_NAME=$1
NAMESPACE_URI=$(echo $2 | sed -e 's/\//\\\//g')
FILE=$3
 
if [ x${NAMESPACE_NAME} = 'x' -o x${NAMESPACE_URI} = 'x' -o ! -f ${FILE} ]; then
    echo 'Usage:' ${0} 'NAMESPACE_NAME NAMESPACE_URI FILE'
    exit 42
fi
 
cat $FILE | sed -e s/xmlns:${NAMESPACE_NAME}=\".*\"/xmlns:${NAMESPACE_NAME}'="'${NAMESPACE_URI}\"/g > $FILE

You can run the script with the following command line:

./change_namespace.sh myns http://my.namespace.uri my_file.xml

Where :

• myns is the namespace name (html, xsl, xhtml, etc...)
• http://my.namespace.uri is the URI of the namespace
• my_file.xml is the file to edit