bash script to write in specific part of xml file - arrays

Question

My problem is that this code below puts the result from the beginning of the file but I want to put it in a specific place.
#!/bin/bash -x
USER_ID=( User1 User2 User3 )
USER_CONF=/opt/test/config.xml
for i in "${USER_ID[#]}"; do
printf '<user><id>ID</id><name><%s/name></user>\n' "$i" >> "$USER_CONF"
done
What I get now in config.xml is:
<company="external">
<enabled>true</enabled>
<users="allowed">
USER_TO_INSERT_HERE
</users>
</company>
<user><id>ID</id><name><User1/name></user>
<user><id>ID</id><name><User2/name></user>
<user><id>ID</id><name><User3/name></user>
What I want to get after the script execution in config.xml is:
<company="external">
<enabled>true</enabled>
<users="allowed">
<user><id>ID</id><name><User1/name></user>
<user><id>ID</id><name><User2/name></user>
<user><id>ID</id><name><User3/name></user>
</users>
</company>
Do you know how can I record the values from the for and write them in a variable then to just sed that var in the code?
I know how to sed it but don't know how to record in the var the values or something like that?

Answer 1

First of all, <users="allowed"> in an invalid XML-node. This should probably be something like <users permission="allowed">.
Please use an XML parser like xidel to edit your 'config.xml'.
With "direct element constructors":
$ xidel -s config.xml -e '
x:replace-nodes(
//users,
<users permission="allowed">{
for $user in ("User1","User2","User3") return
<user><id>ID</id><name>{$user}</name></user>
}</users>
)
' --output-node-format=xml --output-node-indent
With "computed constructors":
$ xidel -s config.xml -e '
x:replace-nodes(
//users,
function($x){
element {$x/name()} {
$x/#*,
for $user in ("User1","User2","User3") return
element user {
element id {"ID"},
element name {$user}
}
}
}
)
' --output-node-format=xml --output-node-indent
Output:
<company="external">
<enabled>true</enabled>
<users permission="allowed">
<user>
<id>ID</id>
<name>User1</name>
</user>
<user>
<id>ID</id>
<name>User2</name>
</user>
<user>
<id>ID</id>
<name>User3</name>
</user>
</users>
</company="external">
Playground

Answer 2

Lots of great answers over at unix.stackexchange.com.
The canonical answer for this sort of case (NOTE: not for XML in general in all cases, but for a file where there's a TOKEN on a line on it's own to be replaced - which is exactly the case you have given) is -
a) Output the part of the file "up to" the line before the line with the token
b) Output the replacement
c) Output the rest of the file "from" the line after the line with the token
e.g. here's the simple sed variant (which is no where near as elegant as the r option to sed) -
sed -e '/USER_TO_INSERT_HERE/,$ d' source.xml
cat replacement.xml
sed -e '1,/USER_TO_INSERT_HERE/ d' source.xml