Parsing xml using powershell

Question

I am new to powershell. I have a config XML which reads as -

<xml>     <Section name="BackendStatus">         <BEName BE="crust" Status="1" />         <BEName BE="pizza" Status="1" />         <BEName BE="pie" Status="1" />         <BEName BE="bread" Status="1" />         <BEName BE="Kulcha" Status="1" />         <BEName BE="kulfi" Status="1" />         <BEName BE="cheese" Status="1" />     </Section> </xml> 

I need to parse each element in BEName to check Status. How can this be done using PowerShell?

Answer 1

First step is to load your xml string into an XmlDocument, using powershell's unique ability to cast strings to [xml]

$doc = [xml]@' <xml>     <Section name="BackendStatus">         <BEName BE="crust" Status="1" />         <BEName BE="pizza" Status="1" />         <BEName BE="pie" Status="1" />         <BEName BE="bread" Status="1" />         <BEName BE="Kulcha" Status="1" />         <BEName BE="kulfi" Status="1" />         <BEName BE="cheese" Status="1" />     </Section> </xml> '@ 

Powershell makes it really easy to parse xml with the dot notation. This statement will produce a sequence of XmlElements for your BEName elements:

$doc.xml.Section.BEName 

Then you can pipe these objects into the where-object cmdlet to filter down the results. You can use ? as a shortcut for where

$doc.xml.Section.BEName | ? { $_.Status -eq 1 } 

The expression inside the braces will be evaluated for each XmlElement in the pipeline, and only those that have a Status of 1 will be returned. The $_ operator refers to the current object in the pipeline (an XmlElement).

If you need to do something for every object in your pipeline, you can pipe the objects into the foreach-object cmdlet, which executes a block for every object in the pipeline. % is a shortcut for foreach:

$doc.xml.Section.BEName | ? { $_.Status -eq 1 } | % { $_.BE + " is delicious" } 

Powershell is great at this stuff. It's really easy to assemble pipelines of objects, filter pipelines, and do operations on each object in the pipeline.

Answer 2

If you want to start with a file you can do this

[xml]$cn = Get-Content config.xml $cn.xml.Section.BEName 

Use PowerShell to Parse an XML File