XSH2 is designed as an environment for querying and manipulating XML and HTML documents. Use open or create commands to load an XML or HTML document from a local file, external URL (such as http:// or ftp://), string or pipe. XSH2 can optionally validate the document during parse process (see validation and load-ext-dtd). Parsed documents are stored in memory as DOM trees, that can be navigated and manipulated with XSH2 commands and XPath language, whose names and syntax make working with the DOM tree a flavor of working in a UNIX filesystem.

A parsed document is usually stored in a variable. XSH2 shares variables with the XPath engine, so if e.g. $doc is a XSH2 variable holding a document (or, more generally any node-set), then $doc//section/title is an XPath expression selecting all title subelements of all section elements within the (sub)tree of $doc.

Although XSH2 is able to parse remote documents via http:// or ftp://, it is only able to save them locally. To upload a document to a remote server (e.g. using FTP) or to store it into a database, use save command with a --pipe parameter, in connection with an external program able to store its standard input (XML) to the desired location. You can also use similar parameter with open in order to parse documents from standard output of some external program.

xsh> save --pipe "ssh my.remote.org 'cat > test.xml'" $doc