Question

I’m trying to use the powershell command select-xml to select data from an xml file. When I run the command below no results or errors are returned. I expect a list of the editions to be returned to the screen. What’s wrong with this?

PS C:\> select-xml -path "C:\t.xml" -xpath "//edition" | foreach {$_.node.InnerXML}
PS C:\>

The XML file (C:\t.xml) is:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
  <Book>
    <projects>
      <project name="Book1" date="2009-01-20">
        <editions>
           <edition language="English">En.Book1.com</edition>
           <edition language="German">Ge.Book1.Com</edition>
           <edition language="French">Fr.Book1.com</edition>
           <edition language="Polish">Pl.Book1.com</edition>
        </editions>
      </project>
    </projects>
  </Book>

Answer 1

OK, so I know what’s wrong. There was one white space character before the first node of the XML declaration. Really annoying. I tried your first line:

PS H:\> $xml = ([xml](Get-Content -Path C:\scripts\t.xml)).Book.Projects.Project

It errored with:

“..The XML declaration must be the
first node in the document, and no
white space characters are allowed to
appear before it…”

I’m sure that the select-xml should fail in the question with this same error when attempting to read an xml file. The xml file rendered fine in IE.