Question

I have a directory of very large XML files with a structure as this:

file1.xml:

<root>
 <EmployeeInfo attr="one" />
 <EmployeeInfo attr="two" />
 <EmployeeInfo attr="three" />
</root>

file2.xml:

<root>
 <EmployeeInfo attr="four" />
 <EmployeeInfo attr="five" />
 <EmployeeInfo attr="six" />
</root>

Now I am looking for a simple way to merge these files (*.xml) files into one output file:

<root>
 <EmployeeInfo attr="one" />
 <EmployeeInfo attr="two" />
 <EmployeeInfo attr="three" />
 <EmployeeInfo attr="four" />
 <EmployeeInfo attr="five" />
 <EmployeeInfo attr="six" />
</root>

I was thinking about using pure XSLT such as this one:

<xsl:transform version="1.0" 
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <Container>
      <xsl:copy-of select="document('file1.xml')"/>
      <xsl:copy-of select="document('file2.xml')"/>        
    </Container>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

This works but isn’t as flexible as I want. Being a novice with PowerShell (version 2) eager to learn new best pracctices of working with XML in PowerShell I am wondering what is the simplest, purest PowerShell way of merging the structre of XML documents into one?

Cheers,
Joakim

Answer 1

While the XSLT way to do this is pretty short, so is the PowerShell way:

$finalXml = "<root>"
foreach ($file in $files) {
    [xml]$xml = Get-Content $file    
    $finalXml += $xml.InnerXml
}
$finalXml += "</root>"
([xml]$finalXml).Save("$pwd\final.xml")

Hope this helps,