Powershell extract string from XML file

Question

Trying to extract some strings from a file. Here's a simplified example of the text in the file:

<modelName>thing1</modelName><gtin>123456789</gtin><description>blah blah blah</description>
<modelName>thing2</modelName><gtin>789456123</gtin><description>blah blah blah</description>
<modelName>thing3</modelName><gtin>456789123</gtin><description>blah blah blah</description>

I want to extract just this part of each line: <gtin>xxxxxxx</gtin> and put them into another file.

I do not want the whole line, just the gtin.

Here's what I tried:

Get-Content -Path C:\firstFile.xml -Readcount 1000 | foreach { $_ -match "<gtin1>*</gtin1>" } | out-file C:\gtins.txt

But as you can probably guess it's not working.

Any help is greatly appreciated. I have a feeling this is embarrassingly easy.

Thanks!

I feel Select-String with -AllMatches switch may help you here learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/…, probably with Substring on the output to remove the extra text from each line. — Gareth Lyons
– Gareth Lyons, Commented Jan 25, 2018 at 18:12

Bill_Stewart · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-25 19:20:03Z

2

(Edit: Ansgar Wiechers is right that you shouldn't parse XML using a regular expression, and that proper XML parsing is vastly to be preferred.)

You can extract substrings using Select-String and a regular expression. Example:

Get-Content "C:\firstfile.xml" | Select-String '(<gtin>.+</gtin>)' | ForEach-Object {
  $_.Matches[0].Groups[1].Value
}

If you want just the value between the tags, move the ( and ) to surround only the .+ portion of the expression.

More information about regular expressions:

PS C:\> help about_Regular_Expressions

edited Jan 25, 2018 at 19:20

answered Jan 25, 2018 at 18:40

Bill_Stewart

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Community · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-20 09:12:55Z

0

Do not parse XML with regular expressions.

Use an actual XML parser for extracting data from XML files.

[xml]$xml = Get-Content 'C:\firstfile.xml'
$xml.SelectNodes('//gtin') | Select-Object -Expand '#text'

edited Jun 20, 2020 at 9:12

CommunityBot

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answered Jan 25, 2018 at 18:43

Ansgar Wiechers

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