PowerShell 2.0: One Cmdlet at a Time 21 Select-XML
Continuing the series looking at new cmdlets available in PowerShell 2.0. This time we look at the Select-XML cmdlet.
What can I do with it?
Search for text in an XML document using an XPath query.
Example:
Example.xml
From the file Example.XML search with the XPath query /shop/food
Select-XML -Path example.xml -XPath “/shop/food”
You’ll notice this hasn’t returned any actual data from the XML file rather details of the search carried out and two matches. This is because Select-XML returns a SelectXMLInfo Object, illustrated below by piping the same command to Get-Member.
To retrieve the results pipe the SelectXMLInfo object through to Select-Object and use the ExpandProperty parameter.
Select-XML -Path example.xml -XPath “/shop/food” | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Node
How could I have done this in PowerShell 1.0?
You could have used the Get-Content cmdlet to read the Example.xml file in as text, converted it to an XML type using [XML] and then used the SelectNodes method to retrieve the data.
[xml]$xml = (Get-Content example.xml) $xml.SelectNodes("/shop/food")
