You know when the XML nerds say not to use regular expressions to parse XML? They’re right.

As part of a less is more project, we wanted to remove the tags from all of the OpenNMS event files. We spent much of the morning playing with a number of methods to find and replace with empty space those tags, and we failed. We came close a couple of times, but then some weird aspect of formatting (tags that spanned multiple lines, some with spaces and some without, etc.) would foil it.

Then I found out about xmlstarlet. We installed it and ran:

xml ed -L -d "/events/event/alarm-data" [filename]

and it just worked. Pipe that bad boy through find and you are good to go.

While I don’t think the option exists, it would be cool if instead of deleting the tag we could just comment it out, but that doesn’t seem to be currently possible.