Exporting output to a Windows command variable

[Anonymous]

I'm aware of this instruction in the documentation

FOR /F "delims=" %%A IN ('xidel http://site -e "title:=//title" -e "links:=//a/@href" --output-format cmd') DO %%A

and of these answers on Stack Overflow but I still get errors (Windows 10) mostly along the lines of

%%A was unexpected at this time.

So: if I have file "in.xml" and I want to select node <my_node> and export it to a cmd variable "my_var" - what exactly do I need to do?
Thanks.

[Reino]

Either directly...

FOR /F "delims=" %A IN ('xidel "in.xml" -e "//my_node"') DO SET my_var=%A

...or let Xidel do it...

FOR /F "delims=" %A IN ('xidel "in.xml" -e "my_var:=//my_node" --output-format^=cmd') DO %A

%A is for the command-line. In a batch-file use %%A.

[Anonymous]

The 'direct' method doesn't really work, as it creates a variable only from the text node of the last element. To illustrate, if input.xml is

<div>
  <p>Hello</p>
  <span>World</span>
 </div>

and I use

FOR /F "delims=" %A IN ('xidel "input.xml" -e "//div"') DO SET my_var1=%A

then

echo %my_var1%

outputs

  World

The indirect method
FOR /F "delims=" %A IN ('xidel "input.xml" -e "my_var2:=//div" --output-format^=cmd') DO %A
works a little better:

echo %my_var2%

Hello  World

and gets both nodes. But the tags are stripped.
The solution would be to somehow combine the indirect method with --output-format xml. Is that possible?

[Reino]

In cmd you can't assign new lines (\r\n) to a variable.
The first method only works for 1 single line output, so you'd have to string-join the text-nodes with xidel if you want "Hello World" as output:

C:\>FOR /F "delims=" %A IN ('xidel input.xml -se "join(//div/*)"') DO SET my_var1=%A

C:\>SET my_var1=Hello World

But the tags are stripped.

That's what xidel does. If you really want the tags preserved, you'd have to use outer-xml():

xidel input.xml -se "//div/*/outer-xml(.)"
<p>Hello</p>
<span>World</span>

[Anonymous]

Nothing is ever simple, but it worked:

FOR /F "delims=" %A IN ('xidel input.xml -se "join(//div/*/outer-xml(.))"') DO SET my_var1=%A

Thank you very much! Learned something new today.

[Reino]

That's great, but I think it's worth noting however that if you want to output valid xml, then you'd better do...

xidel input.xml -se "//div/*" --output-format=xml --output-declaration="<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?>"
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xml>
<p>Hello</p>
<span>World</span>
</xml>

On Win10 you could try without --output-declaration, but as my cmd's code-page defaults to 437 I'm getting <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ibm437"?>

[Anonymous]

It looks like we have to stick to your original answer :D.

For xidel stand alone, your new version (with or without --output-declaration in Windows 10) does produce valid xm. But when wrapped inside a FOR/DO it fails, since my_var1 is the last node tag, not the whole input file. The outcome is the same even if, instead of -se "//div/*", you use -se "join(//div/*)" or -se "join(//div/*/outer-xml(.))". So, your original still stands...

By way of background (I didn't want to clutter the original question with this), but I may not necessarily want my_var1 to be valid xml. The purpose of the exercise, behind the scenes, is to use the variable as an input for an insertion of a new node into another xml file (basically, copy element from file 1 as a variable and use the variable to paste a new node into file 2). There are other ways of achiving this, but using this one, the variable can be thought of as more of a string literal than a valid xml document - it just needs to look like a valid xml fragment suitable for insertion into file 2. So with that in mind - there's another reason to stick with the original.