TheGeekery

The Usual Tech Ramblings

Removing XML Elements using PowerShell

Every now and again I have to strip out elements from an XML file. In this case, I was doing some cleanup of my Remote Desktop Manager configuration file. When I first started my current job, to save a lot of discovery, my boss shared his configuration file. Unfortunately the configuration file had a lot of hosts that had duplicate configuration information that wasn’t relevant because the “duplicate” option had been used to copy existing hosts. This meant stuff like host description had been copied.

Remote Desktop Manager (RDM) uses an XML file for its configuration, which makes editing it really easy. To clean up the invalid descriptions, I used a little PowerShell and some XML know-how. Here is an example entry I need to clean up…

  <Connection>
    <ConnectionType>RDPConfigured</ConnectionType>
    <Events />
    <Group>MyDomain\App Servers\DEV</Group>
    <ID>73146eeb-caf9-4579-a146-41f7330261a6</ID>
    <MetaInformation />
    <Name>SERVER1</Name>
    <ScreenSize>R1280x800</ScreenSize>
    <Stamp>5f8a9830-fc2e-440e-a72b-f889d5b17a5b</Stamp>
    <Url>SERVER1</Url>
    <Description>HP Command View EVA</Description>
  </Connection>

And here is the PowerShell that is used to cleanup the file.


[xml]$xml = Get-Content C:\Temp\Connections.XML

$node = $conns.SelectSingleNode("//Description[.='HP Command View EVA']")
while ($node -ne $null) {
    $node.ParentNode.RemoveChild($node)
    $node = $conns.SelectSingleNode("//Description[.='HP Command View EVA']")
}

$xml.save("C:\Temp\Connections.XML")

Pretty simple, but here is how it works. The first line is pretty obvious, it’s getting the content of the file1. It then explicitly converts the array object into XML using [xml]. The next bit is where it gets a little harder, and requires a little knowledge of XPath syntax. The code is looking to select a single node, that has the name “Description”, with the data in it that says ‘HP Command View EVA’. If it’s found, it’ll return a XMLElement object, otherwise $node ends up being $null. This gives us the ability to wrap the search in a loop, and remove the elements we don’t need. To remove the element, you have to tell the parent node to remove it, so you ask the node to go back to the parent to remove itself, a little weird, but it works. The final step is to go back and save it to a file.

The hardest bit about handling XML is knowing how XPath stuff works, once that is understood, the rest is usually pretty easy. PowerShell treats XML as an object, so it’s easy to figure out what you can do with the objects using Get-Member.

  1. Which I had copied to C:\Temp to make a backup of, instead of working on the real file. 

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