xml - String tokenisation algorithm won't tokenise -

morning all, writing bash script extract values of xml tags files in given directory. have decided tokenising each line , returning th4e relavent token. problem isn't tokenising correctly , can't quite work out why. here smallest example make reconstructs issue

#!/bin/bash file in `ls $my_directory`     line in `cat $my_directory/$file`             localifs=$ifs         ifs=<>\"          tokens=( $line )         ifs=$localifs         echo "token 0: ${tokens[0]}"          echo "token 1: ${tokens[1]}"          echo "token 2: ${tokens[2]}"          echo "token 3: ${tokens[3]}"       done  done 

i'm guessing issue fiddling ifs inside loop uses ifs (i.e. cat operation), has never been problem before.
ideas?

thanks, rik

use better tool parse xml, ideally should parser, if requirement simple , know how xml structured, simple string manipulation might suffice. example, xml file , want value of tag3

$  cat file blah <tag1>value1 </tag1> <tag2>value2 </tag2> <tag3>value3 </tag3> blah  $ awk -vrs="</tag3>" '/tag2/{ gsub(/.*tag3>/,"");print}' file value3 

so iterate on directory

for file in *.xml   value="$(awk -vrs="</tag3>" '/tag2/{ gsub(/.*tag3>/,"");print}' "$file" )"   echo "$value" done