can't figure out Xpath to query text and url nodes for SearchSuggestion using xmlstarlet - Mediawiki-api

9 Jan 2012

I am having trouble figuring out how to give XMLStarlet the right Xpath to
query nodes  in a Wikipedia XML document. This is an xpath problem, really,
not a starlet problem.  I don't understand how to formulate the xpath
portion of the xmlstarlet call.  Help!

curl "
...

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=opensearch&search=Bullwinkle&a…
 -o bullwinkle.xml 

...
  returns:
 ?xml version="1.0"?>
 <SearchSuggestion version="2.0" xmlns="
 http://opensearch.org/searchsuggest2">
 <Query xml:space="preserve">Bullwinkle</Query>
  <Section>
 <Item>
 <Text xml:space="preserve">Bullwinkle</Text>
  <Description xml:space="preserve">Bullwinkle may refer
to:</Description>
 <Url
xml:space="preserve">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwinkle&l…
  </Item>
 <Item>
 <Text xml:space="preserve">Bullwinkle J. Moose</Text>
  <Description xml:space="preserve">Bullwinkle J. </Description>
 <Url
xml:space="preserve">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwinkle_J…
 ... 

I try:

...
   xmlstarlet sel -N
x=http://opensearch.org/searchsuggest2 -t -v
 "count(/SearchSuggestion/Section/@Item)" bullwinkle.xml 

which I want to count the items, but it won't.

WHat I am working to do is to extract the text and url values and put them
into a csv file. How to do this is explained at
http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/doc/UG/ch04s01.html (about 2/3 way down) but
you have to know how to formulate the xpath for the source xml doc--which I
don't!

Any help would be much appreciated.

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