Powershell Tip : Use XML Indentation to make it more readable

Hey guys!

Today’s blog post is a quick Powershell tip which is useful when we’ve to generate Dynamic XML using a Powershell script, if the file gets huge it gets difficult to read the XML data , hence in such a case Indentation comes handy.

HOW  TO MAKE IT WORK ?

Use System.IO.StringWriter  and System.XMl.XmlTextWriter classes  to build/write a XML string in an underlying String builder, containing XML data that complies with W3C (World wide web consortium) XML 1.0 standards.

You’ve just take care about two XmlTextWriter properties to indent your XML’s, those are

Make sure you make the property Formatting as indented  and provide an positive integer value to Indentation property for number of chars to write for each level in XML hierarchy.

SCRIPT : 

	Function Format-XMLIndent
	{
	[Cmdletbinding()]
	[Alias("IndentXML")]
	param
	(
	[xml]$Content,
	[int]$Indent
	)
	# String Writer and XML Writer objects to write XML to string
	$StringWriter = New-Object System.IO.StringWriter
	$XmlWriter = New-Object System.XMl.XmlTextWriter $StringWriter
	# Default = None, change Formatting to Indented
	$xmlWriter.Formatting = "indented"
	# Gets or sets how many IndentChars to write for each level in
	# the hierarchy when Formatting is set to Formatting.Indented
	$xmlWriter.Indentation = $Indent
	$Content.WriteContentTo($XmlWriter)
	$XmlWriter.Flush();$StringWriter.Flush()
	$StringWriter.ToString()
	}

view raw IndentXML.ps1 hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Hoping this would be useful for you, Thanks for reading ! 🙂

Prateek Singh

Follow @SinghPrateik