Question

I’m writing a script that is supposed to look at the content of a file and determine if it is a (well formed) XML or not. I found a page on [ss64.com][1] that this is quite easy to do:

>32 -is [int]
True

The thing is however that I can only test this by casting the left-side for XML files:

>[xml](Get-Content c:\Path\To\xml_file.xml) -is [xml]
False

…which in this case would be rather pointless: if the file is XML, the casting will already prove this, else throw an exception. I therefore wonder: is there any way to determine XML files in Powershell in a True-False way?

Answer 1

Try the -as operator:

[bool]((Get-Content c:\Path\To\xml_file.xml) -as [xml])