Convert XML to JSON in PowerShell
PowerShell offers various cmdlets to work with JSON and XML formats. This guide will focus on converting an XML document to JSON formatted string using PowerShell.
Access XML Document Keys and Values
PowerShell enables manipulating XML document nodes using Select-Xml cmdlet. We can specify XPath expressions to find nodes and their text values in an XML document.
Syntax:
Select-Xml
[-XPath] <string>
[-Path] <string[]>
[-Namespace <hashtable>]
[<CommonParameters>]
Let’s create an XML document called employeeinfo.xml with the following content.
XML - employeeinfo.xml:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Employees>
<Employee>
<EmpId>1</EmpId>
<EmpAge>45</EmpAge>
<EmpDesignation>SSE</EmpDesignation>
</Employee>
<Employee>
<EmpId>2</EmpId>
<EmpAge>34</EmpAge>
<EmpDesignation>Junior SE</EmpDesignation>
</Employee>
</Employees>
Now, we are going to access each XML node EmpId, EmpAge, and EmpDesignation using the Select-Xml cmdlet as follows.
Code:
$empIds = Select-Xml -Path "D:\codes\employeeinfo.xml" -XPath "//Employee//EmpId" | foreach {$_.node.InnerText}
$empAges = Select-Xml -Path "D:\codes\employeeinfo.xml" -XPath "//Employee//EmpAge" | foreach {$_.node.InnerText}
$empDesigs = Select-Xml -Path "D:\codes\employeeinfo.xml" -XPath "//Employee//EmpDesignation" | foreach {$_.node.InnerText}
In this example, the -Path is the location where the employeeinfo.xml is located. Since we need to fetch three nodes per employee object, PowerShell foreach has been used.
The XPath expression looks like the following for each node.
EmpID node can be accessed by the XPath query "//Employee//EmpId".
EmpAge node can be accessed by the XPath query "//Employee//EmpIAge".
EmpDesignation node can be accessed by the XPath query "//Employee//EmpDesignation".
The reference variables $empIds, $empAges and $empDesigs contains array of values for respective XML nodes. Let’s write the arrays into PowerShell console windows.
Construct PowerShell Hash to Hold Data
We do not have a straightforward approach to converting an XML document to a JSON string. Hence, as shown in the above section, we have to extract XML data and push those data to a PowerShell hash as an intermediate format.
Let’s construct the hash.
$empObjHash1 = @{
EmpId = $empIds[0];
EmpAge = $empAges[0];
EmpDesignation = $empDesigs[0];
}
$empObjHash2 = @{
EmpId = $empIds[1];
EmpAge = $empAges[1];
EmpDesignation = $empDesigs[1];
}
$finalHash = @{}
$finalHash.Add("emp1", $empObjHash1)
$finalHash.Add("emp2", $empObjHash2)
We have extracted the two employee objects from the XML for demonstration purposes and pushed those data to two hash objects, $empObjHash1 and $empObjHash2. Then the $finalHash is created by pushing the two employee objects.
If we print the $finalHash, it would look like the following.
We can use the foreach loop to inspect the $finalHash in more detail.
Code:
foreach($em in $finalHash.keys) {
foreach($emp in $finalHash[$em]) {
foreach($val in $emp.keys) {
Write-Host "Key:" $val "Value:" $emp[$val]
}
}
}
Output:
The $finalHash has been constructed with the relevant data extracted from the XML.
Convert Hash to JSON
Since we got a PowerShell hash $finalHash, it is possible to use the ConvertTo-Json cmdlet to create a JSON out of the hash.
Syntax:
ConvertTo-Json
[-InputObject] <Object>
[-Depth <Int32>]
[-Compress]
[-EnumsAsStrings]
[-AsArray]
[-EscapeHandling <StringEscapeHandling>]
[<CommonParameters>]
Let’s pass the created hash $finalHash to create the JSON string as shown in the following.
Code:
$finalHash | ConvertTo-Json
Output:
PowerShell Full Script:
$empIds = Select-Xml -Path "D:\codes\employeeinfo.xml" -XPath "//Employee//EmpId" | foreach {$_.node.InnerText}
$empAges = Select-Xml -Path "D:\codes\employeeinfo.xml" -XPath "//Employee//EmpAge" | foreach {$_.node.InnerText}
$empDesigs = Select-Xml -Path "D:\codes\employeeinfo.xml" -XPath "//Employee//EmpDesignation" | foreach {$_.node.InnerText}
$empObjHash1 = @{
EmpId = $empIds[0];
EmpAge = $empAges[0];
EmpDesignation = $empDesigs[0];
}
$empObjHash2 = @{
EmpId = $empIds[1];
EmpAge = $empAges[1];
EmpDesignation = $empDesigs[1];
}
$finalHash = @{}
$finalHash.Add("emp1", $empObjHash1)
$finalHash.Add("emp2", $empObjHash2)
foreach($em in $finalHash.keys) {
foreach($emp in $finalHash[$em]) {
foreach($val in $emp.keys) {
Write-Host "Key:" $val "Value:" $emp[$val]
}
}
}
$finalHash | ConvertTo-Json
Nimesha is a Full-stack Software Engineer for more than five years, he loves technology, as technology has the power to solve our many problems within just a minute. He have been contributing to various projects over the last 5+ years and working with almost all the so-called 03 tiers(DB, M-Tier, and Client). Recently, he has started working with DevOps technologies such as Azure administration, Kubernetes, Terraform automation, and Bash scripting as well.
