PowerShell – XML – Handling Nodes with and without attributes
I have to change the innertext of an XML node. But the XML node can come in various states such as:
<MachineID>1234</MachineID> or
<MachineID issuer="companyA">1234</MachineID> or
<MachineID issuer="">1234</MachineID> and they can be empty
<MachineID /> I’m trying to find a better way of handling this than:
$count = 0; try{ $XMLNode = $Value; } catch{ $count++; } try{ $XMLNode.InnerText = $Value; } catch{ $count++; } try{ $XMLNode.'#text' = $Value; } catch{ $count++; } if($count -gt 2){ echo ("Failed to set " + $XMLNode.Name + " to " + $Value); } 
It seems like node selection is the main issue here. The following works for me in your test cases.
# Assuming your xml content is in the file file.xml $x = [xml](Get-Content file.xml) $Value = 27000 $x.SelectSingleNode('//MachineID').InnerText = $Value 
