how can a BPEL variable be put into a shell variable

Question

a BPEL process creates a xml document, a certain XSD file that has xml structure and i want to parse that BPEL variable with xmllint or xmlstarlet with a unix shell commandline command. is that possible at all?

how can i put the BPEL variable into a shell variable , in order to be able to parse it with xmllint for instance?

INPUT:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ns:ItemList xmlns:ns="http:///blabla">
    <GenericItem>
        <ns2:LocalItem xmlns:ns2="http:///blabla">
            <ItemSource> </ItemSource>
            <ConcItemSource>
                <name></name>
                <requirements/>
                <strategy/>
            </ConcItemSource>
            <dataFormat/>
            <directory></directory>
            <file/>
        </ns2:LocalItem>
    </GenericItem>
    <GenericItem>
        <ns2:LocalItem xmlns:ns2="http:///blabla">
            <ItemSource>
            </ItemSource>
            <ConcItemSource>
                <name></name>
                <requirements/>
                <strategy/>
            </ConcItemSource>
            <dataFormat/>
            <directory></directory>
            <file/>
        </ns2:LocalItem>
    </GenericItem>
</ns:ItemList>

Answer 1

Using xmlstarlet :

$ cat bpel.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ns:ItemList xmlns:ns="http:///blabla">
    <GenericItem>
        <ns2:LocalItem xmlns:ns2="http:///blabla">
            <ItemSource> </ItemSource>
            <ConcItemSource>
                <name></name>
                <requirements/>
                <strategy/>
            </ConcItemSource>
            <dataFormat/>
            <directory>d1</directory>
            <file/>
        </ns2:LocalItem>
    </GenericItem> 
    <GenericItem>
        <ns2:LocalItem xmlns:ns2="http:///blabla">
            <ItemSource>
            </ItemSource>
            <ConcItemSource>
                <name></name>
                <requirements/>
                <strategy/>
            </ConcItemSource>
            <dataFormat/>
            <directory>d2</directory>
            <file/>
        </ns2:LocalItem>
    </GenericItem>
</ns:ItemList>

command line :

$ dir1=$(xmlstarlet sel -t -v '//directory[1]/text()' bpel.xml)
$ echo "$dir1"
d1

Using a for loop :

$ count=$(xmlstarlet sel -t -v 'count(//directory)' bpel.xml)
$ for ((i=1; i<=count; i++)) {
    xmlstarlet sel -t -v "//directory[$i]/text()" bpel.xml >> newfile
}

But you can do simply :

$ xmlstarlet sel -t -v "//directory/text()" bpel.xml >> newfile

xmlstarlet from STDIN :

command_producing_xml | xmlstarlet sel -t -v "//directory/text()" -