Powershell reading xml files

Anything that can be done with. NET can be done with PowerShell, give or take. Pretty-printing XML is certainly possible, but I doubt that that's what you really need. You want to work with the contained values somehow, and outputting a nice table of values is both easier and more useful than printing out an indented XML tree.

I'll add an example to my answer. This is an actual bug in PowerShell, and an embarrassing one, too. I've created a bug report for the Select-Xml encoding problem: github.

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Stack Gives Back Jquery Selectors. How to use Selectors in JQuery. What is Attribute. Form Data. JQuery Effects. CSS Methods. CSS Method. Search for:. TextBox value from view to controller October 9th, State Management in ASP. Difference between Html.

RenderPartial vs Html. Partial vs Html. RenderAction vs Html. The rest is up to you. Adam Bertram. PowerShell offers several ways to read XML documents, without writing a lot of code. Adam Bertram is a year veteran of IT and experienced online business professional. He's an entrepreneur, IT influencer, Microsoft MVP, blogger, trainer and content marketing writer for multiple technology companies.

Adam is also the founder of the popular IT career development platform TechSnips. Catch up on Adam's articles at adamtheautomator. Learn more about lean manufacturing strategies and how to Microsoft Azure vs. Amazon Web Services: Cloud This is where the schema comes in to play. When you lean on XML data, you must ensure that all the data is valid according to the defined schema. It might have already performed some irreversible operations on the file system and the registry, by that time.

So, how can you check in advance that the data is correct? Generally speaking, errors found on XML files belong to one of two categories; metadata errors and errors in the data itself. This file MorePeople. You can see below that the file has a single People element the root element with three Person elements inside.

This structure is perfectly acceptable. Still, it contains one exception, can you see it? The problem is found in the first inner element:. What should have been a Country was misspelled, and Canada was degraded to a County.

The metadata, i. So what is wrong? This time the problem, again on the first Person line, is in one of the values. Someone decided that yes is a good enough substitute for true — but code like below will fail to get the first element as it is looking for true , not for yes :. Now that you know the types of errors that may occur, it is time to show how a schema file helps.

The first step is creating a sample data file. The sample can be the smallest example and contain nothing but a single inner element. Now build a PowerShell function below and use it with the sample data to create the.

Copy the function to your ISE or your favorite Powershell editor, load it into memory and use it to create the schema. With the function loaded, the code to create the schema is this one-liner:. Take a look at the location specified by the results above.