This section describes the options of the xml-parser() in syslog-ng OSE.

drop-invalid()

Accepted values: yes, no
Default: no
Mandatory: no

Description: If set, messages with an invalid XML will be dropped entirely.

exclude-tags()

Accepted values: list of globs
Default:  
Mandatory: no

Description: The XML parser matches tags against the listed globs. If there is a match, the given subtree of the XML will be omitted.
If not set, no filtering is done.

Example: Using exclude-tags

parser xml_parser {
    xml(
        template("${MSG}")
        exclude-tags("tag1", "tag2", "inner*")
    );
};

From this XML input:

<tag1>Text1</tag1><tag2>Text2</tag2><tag3>Text3<innertag>TextInner</innertag></tag3>

The following output is generated:

{"_xml":{"tag3":"Text3"}}

prefix()

Type: string
Default: .xml.

Description: Insert a prefix before the name part of the parsed name-value pairs to help further processing. For example:

  • To insert the my-parsed-data. prefix, use the prefix(my-parsed-data.) option.

  • To refer to a particular data that has a prefix, use the prefix in the name of the macro, for example, ${my-parsed-data.name}.

  • If you forward the parsed messages using the IETF-syslog protocol, you can insert all the parsed data into the SDATA part of the message using the prefix(.SDATA.my-parsed-data.) option.

Names starting with a dot (for example, .example) are reserved for use by syslog-ng OSE. If you use such a macro name as the name of a parsed value, it will attempt to replace the original value of the macro (note that only soft macros can be overwritten, see Hard versus soft macros. To avoid such problems, use a prefix when naming the parsed values, for example, prefix(my-parsed-data.).

By default, xml-parser() uses the .xml. prefix. To modify it, use the following format:

parser {
    xml-parser(
        ... other options ...
        prefix("myprefix.")
    );
};

strip-whitespaces()

Accepted values: yes, no
Default: no
Mandatory: no

Description: Strip the whitespaces from the XML text nodes before adding them to the message.

Example: Using strip-whitespaces

parser xml_parser {
    xml(
        template("${MSG}")
        strip-whitespaces(yes)
    );
};

From this XML input:

<tag1> Tag </tag1>

The following output is generated:

{"_xml":{"tag1":"Tag"}}

template()

Synopsis: template(“${<macroname>}”)

Description: The macro that contains the part of the message that the parser will process. It can also be a macro created by a previous parser of the log path. By default, the parser processes the entire message (${MESSAGE}).

Updated: