Force xmllint to ignore bad default xmlns

xmllint --xpath "/*[local-name() = 'project']/*[local-name() = 'parent']/*[local-name() = 'version']/text()" pom.xml

For a top level pom.xml:

xmllint --xpath "/*[local-name() = 'project']/*[local-name() = 'version']/text()" pom.xml

It ain't real pretty, but it avoids formatting assumptions and/or re-formatting the input pom.xml file.

If you need to strip off the "-SNAPSHOT" for some reason, pipe the result of the above through | sed -e "s|-SNAPSHOT||".

strip the namespace with sed

given in pom.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
</project>

this:

cat pom.xml | sed '2 s/xmlns=".*"//g' | xmllint --xpath '/project/modelVersion' -

returns this:

<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

if you have funky formatting (like, the xmlns attributes are on their own lines), run it through the formatter first:

cat pom.xml | xmllint --format - | sed '2 s/xmlns=".*"//g' | xmllint --xpath '/project/modelVersion' -