XSH: Interactively Manipulate and Analyze XML Data

ML is a flexible language for storing hierarchical data along with its associated metadata. Storing XML data enables you to manipulate and analyze it later. When writing applications, you probably use some kind of XSLT engine (Cocoon, for example) in order to pick out pieces of data from the structured XML file and transform them into an output format or process the data in some other way. Usually this means you have to write, compile, and then invoke code in order to test what it does on an XML file. Writing the code also usually requires one or two dozen lines of boilerplate code for proper compilation. This code could be Java (lots of extraneous boilerplate code) or XSLT (a little bit of extraneous boilerplate code). Wouldn't it be nice to just invoke the query and manipulation commands directly on the XML data without all the overhead?

Enter XSH, an open source command-line XML shell that lets you interactively query and manipulate XML data, simplifying development and testing of XML query and manipulation code. Since XSH is written in Perl, its syntax resembles Perl syntax, a boon if you are already familiar with Perl. XSH even lets you write Perl code and access XML data structures as if they were ordinary Perl variables. In addition to Perl, XSH gives you XSLT capabilities such as XPath querying, enabling you to quickly and succinctly express complex queries with the XPath language.