Read XML

Read XML

Type: xml-read  ·  Package: XML Activities v1.1.1  ·  Output: string

Reads an XML file and returns its contents as text. It is the first step of the XML flow: load the document to then query or modify it with the other activities.

How it works

Reads the file at path with the encoding given and returns its contents as a string, exactly as they are in the file (no reformatting). Pass it as xml to the query and modification activities.

Before returning it, it checks that the XML is well-formed and safe: a file with a DTD (<!DOCTYPE …>), larger than 50 MB or nested more than 256 levels deep is rejected. See Security and limits.

It doesn’t modify or lock the file: you can read it as many times as you like.

Required parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
path	string	—	Path of the XML file.

Optional parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
encoding	string	"utf-8"	Name of the encoding used to read the file (e.g. "utf-8", "utf-16", "iso-8859-1"). If the file has a BOM, the BOM wins.

Output

Returns a string with the whole contents of the file.

Common errors

Message	Cause and fix
File not found.	The path doesn’t exist. If the file may be missing, check first with File Exists.
'path' is required.	path was left empty or its expression returned null.
.NET unsupported-encoding message	encoding is not a valid encoding name. Use "utf-8", "utf-16" or "iso-8859-1".
XML parser message with line and position	The file is not well-formed XML.
The XML declares a DTD (<!DOCTYPE>). … / The XML is too large … / The XML is nested more than 256 levels deep.	The package’s security limits. See Common package errors.

Example

Read XML   path = filePath   → output: xml
XML Query Text   xml = xml   xpath = "//Invoice/Number"   → output: number
Log   message = "Invoice read: " + number

Reading a Latin-1 file:

Read XML   path = "C:/input/customers.xml"   encoding = "iso-8859-1"   → output: xml

To convert the file directly

If you only need to convert the document into a dictionary, XML to Dictionary takes the path in path and honours the encoding the XML itself declares: you don’t need to read it first.

Related activities

• XML Query Text / XML Query All — extract data.
• XML to Dictionary — convert the whole document.
• Write XML — save the modified XML.