PowerShell changes return object's type

Question

I am using PowerShell v3 and the Windows PowerShell ISE. I have the following function that works fine:

function Get-XmlNode([xml]$XmlDocument, [string]$Nod         


        

Answer 1

More specifically, what is happening here is that your coding habit of strongly typing $fullyQualifiedModePath is trying to turn the result of the Get (which is a list of objects) into a string.

[string]$foo

will constrain the variable $foo to only be a string, no matter what came back. In this case, your type constraint is what is subtly screwing up the return and making it Object[]

Also, looking at your code, I would personally recommend you use Select-Xml (built into V2 and later), rather than do a lot of hand-coded XML unrolling. You can do namespace queries in Select-Xml with -Namespace @{x="..."}.