In my company we started to use XML files as configuration files. So we use it for some configurations of servers or automation for our robots. In Powershell there is a pretty easy way for parsing XML. In Powershell there is an object type for XML, so you just can use the get-content Cmdlet to read the XML file into the object.
$xmldata = get-content "C:\XMLFiles\mydata.xml"
When you create a function for reading XML files you also can set the XML object to global.
$global:xmldata = get-content "C:\XMLFiles\mydata.xml
Now $xmldata is a object which includes all the data of the mydata.xml.
Lets view the content of the mydata.xml file. We need this to understand the following commands.
<TodoList ID = “Week21″>
<Task action=”create” ID=”1″>
<Name>Peter</Name>
<Dept>Administration</Dept>
<email>peter@contoso.com</email>
</Task><Task action=”create” ID=”2″>
<Name>Thomas</Name>
<Dept>Administration</Dept>
<email>thomas@contoso.com</email>
</Task><Task action=”delete” ID=”3″>
<Name>Steve</Name>
<Dept>IT</Dept>
<email>steve@contoso.com</email>
</Task></TodoList>
Now we wanna get all unique Accounts listed
$xmldata.TodoList.Task | %{$_.Name} | select-object -unique
Peter
Thomas
Stefan
We can also create a new object for a specific Task
[Object]$xmltask2 = $xmldata.TodoList.Task | Where-Object {$_.ID -eq "2"}
Now we have a new object with data from Task ID 2. If we wanna see the name from this we just use the same command with the new object
$xmltask3 | %{$_.Name}
Thomas
We can do a lot more with this, but I will bring this up in the next blog posts.
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