Selecting attributes in xml using xpath in powershell

Question

I am trying to use powershell and XPath to select the name attribute shown in the below xml example.

     $xml_peoples= $file.SelectNodes(\"//people\") 
             


        

Answer 1

For anyone that has to work around Select-Xml's garbage namespace handling, here's a one-liner that doesn't care, as long as you know the direct path:

([xml](Get-Content -Path "path\to.xml")).Peoples.Person.Name

The above will return all matching nodes as well. It's not as powerful, but it's clean when you know the schema and want one thing out of it quickly.