XML Programmatic Interface (XML-PI) was introduced in Cisco IOS Release 12.4(22)T. XML-PI provides a programmable interface which encapsulates IOS command-line interface (CLI) show commands in XML format in a consistent way across different Cisco products. Customers using XML-PI will be able to parse IOS show command output from within Tcl scripts using well-known keywords instead of having to depend on the use of regular expression support to "screen-scrape" output.

The benefit of using the XML-PI command extensions is to facilitate the extraction of specific output information that is generated using a CLI show command. Most show commands return many fields within the output and currently a regular expression has to be used to extract specific information that may appear in the middle of a line. XML-PI support provides a set of Tcl library functions to facilitate the parsing of output from the IOS CLI format extension in the form of:

show
 <
show-command
> | format
 {
spec-file
}

where a spec-file is a concatenation of all Spec File Entries (SFE) for each show command currently supported. As part of the XML-PI project a default spec-file will be included in the IOS Release 12.4(22)T images. The default spec-file will have a small set of commands and the SFE for the commands will have a subset of the possible tags. If no spec-file is provided with the format command, the default spec-file is used.

For more general details about XML-PI, see the "XML-PI" module.