XMLStarlet or another XPath engine is the correct tool for this job.
For instance,withdata.xmlcontaining the following:
<root> <item><title>15:54:57 - George:</title><description>Diane DeConn? You saw Diane DeConn!</description></item>15:55:17 - Jerry:Something huh?</root>
...you can extract only the first title with the following:
xmlstarlet sel -t m '//title[1]' v .n <dataxml
Trying to use sed for this job istroublesome. For instance,the regex-based approaches won't work if the title has attributes; won't handle CDATA sections; won't correctly recognize namespace mappings; can't determine whether a portion of the XML documented is commented out; won't unescape attribute references (such as changingBrewster & JobstoBrewster & Jobs),and so forth.
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Do you reallyhave touse only those tools? They're not designed for XML processing,and although it's possible to get something that works OK most of the time,it will fail on edge cases,like encoding,line breaks,etc.
I recommend xml_grep:
xml_grep 'job' jobsxml --text_only
Which gives the output:
programming
On ubuntu/debian,xml_grep is in the xml-twig-tools package.