Question

I would like to create a Powershell script that automates parsing an XML, but collecting only certain information from it.

As it stands, right now, my script looks similar to this.

[xml]$xml = Get-Content .\myxml.xml
$foo_sub_length = $xml.report.foos.foo.length - 1
$foo_looper = 0
$foo_looper_brackets = "[$foo_looper]"
if ($foo_sub_length -eq "") {$foo_looper_brackets = ""}
do {
    $xml.report.foos.foo$foo_looper_brackets.bar
}
while ($foo_looper -le $foo_sub_length)

Basically, it needs to go through and print out all of the $xml.report.foos.foo.bar values. When I run this script, I receive the error,

Unexpected token 'node_looper_brackets' in expression or statement.
At C:\Users\notarealuser\Desktop\xmlscript.ps1:10 char:55          #not reflective of the above script
+ CategoryInfo          : ParserError: (foo_looper_brackets:String) [], ParseException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : UnexpectedToken
+     $xml.report.foos.foo$foo_looper_brackets <<<< .bar

Any ideas on why or how my looping is not working?

Answer 1

You might be better off extracting this info with XPath. If you’re not using XML namespaces this is pretty trivial (and namespaces only makes it slightly harder):

PS> [xml]'<doc><title>Foo</title><title>Bar</title></doc>' | 
         Select-Xml '/doc/title' | Foreach {$_.Node.InnerText}

Foo
Bar