#127 issue when ed -d (delete) is specified multiple times

[Sridhar Krishnamurthy]

$ cat test.xml 
<a>
    <b val="10" />
    <b val="20" />
    <b val="30" />
</a>

$ xmlstarlet ed -P -S -d '/a/b[1]' -d '/a/b[2]' test.xml | xmlstarlet format -s 4 -
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<a>
    <b val="20"/>
</a>

Shouldn't the result be the following

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<a>
    <b val="30"/>
</a>

Version information

$ xmlstarlet --version
1.6.1
compiled against libxml2 2.9.4, linked with 20910
compiled against libxslt 1.1.33, linked with 10134

[Dagobert Michelsen]

Hi Sridhar,

the modifies are processed in order and are especially not applied all-at-once to the originating tree. This means you first delete the first element (10) leaving two elements (20, 30), than you delete the second element from this result (30), so the remained is 20. If you want to delete the first two elements you can do so by

xmlstarlet ed -P -S -d '/a/b[1]' -d '/a/b[1]' test.xml | xmlstarlet format -s 4 -

[Sridhar Krishnamurthy]

Thank you. it confirms my reasoning too. But the syntactical problem is aggravated if there are just two b elements. In this case the command line looks like xmlstarlet ed -P -S -d '/a/b[1]' -d '/a/b' test.xml | xmlstarlet format -s 4 - which is quite counter intuitive. I respect the designer's decision but would have preferred it otherwise as in the case where the command line is itself generated through scripts.