Parsing xml using powershell

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

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.

[xml]$xmlfile = '<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>'

foreach ($bename in $xmlfile.xml.Section.BEName) {
    if($bename.Status -eq 1){
        #Do something
    }
}