How to remove comments from an XML file?

Is there a command line tool that can remove comments from an XML file? Or do I need to write a small program that makes use of an XML parser to do this?

Update: I'm not interested in solutions that only handle a subset of all possible XML files.

For instance a regexp can't handle XML parsing.

2 Answers

I would do it in this way:

cat myfile.xml | sed '/<!--.*-->/d' | sed '/<!--/,/-->/d' > cleaned.xml

Or:

awk 'in_comment&&/-->/{sub(/([^-]|-[^-])*--+>/,"");in_comment=0} in_comment{next} {gsub(/<!--+([^-]|-[^-])*--+>/,""); in_comment=sub(/<!--+.*/,""); print}'

Or:

xmlstarlet ed -d '//comment()' file.xml

4

To expand on the top answer. If you only want to delete the comment and not the entire line, you should probably use:

sed 's/<!--.*-->//'

In my case, I had a minified XML file where the entire content was in a single line and since the previous solution would delete the entire line where the comment was located, it would completely clear out my file.

1

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