Powershell systeminfo as JSON or XML

Question

I am executing:

   systeminfo | ConvertTo-Json 

   "Host Name:                 namehere",
   "OS Name:                   Microsoft Windows 10 Enterprise",
    ...

but I need

   "Host Name":                 "namehere",
   "OS Name":                   "Microsoft Windows 10 Enterprise",
    ...

The following command gives a similar issue

systeminfo | ConvertTo-Xml -As String

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Objects>
  <Object Type="System.String"></Object>
  <Object Type="System.String">Host Name:                 namehere</Object>
  <Object Type="System.String">OS Name:                   Microsoft Windows 10 Enterprise</Object> " 

but I need something like:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <HostName>namehere</HostName>
    <OSName>Microsoft Windows 10 Enterprise</OSName> 
    ...

Answer 1

try this:

systeminfo /fo CSV | ConvertFrom-Csv

or

systeminfo /fo CSV | ConvertFrom-Csv | convertto-json

Answer 2

To complement thom schumacher's helpful answer :

In PSv5+ you can alternatively use Get-ComputerInfo .

While the field (property) names in the resulting [Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.ComputerInfo] instance aren't identical to the ones in systeminfo 's output, you're likely to get additional information there.

Since Get-ComputerInfo outputs an object whose properties contain the information, you can send that directly to ConvertTo-Json / ConvertTo-Xml

Get-ComputerInfo | ConvertTo-Json

---

As for what you tried :

External programs such as systeminfo can only output text , and often do so in (semi-) unstructured form that is more geared toward human viewing than further programmatic processing.

By contrast, in order to get meaningful output from ConvertTo-Json / ConvertTo-Xml , you need either a structured text format - which systeminfo happens to offer via its /FO option - or input objects , which is what you get PowerShell's cmdlets output.

Therefore, it's usually better to look for PowerShell alternatives to external programs; if their are none, and if the external programs don't offer structured-text output, you have to resort to doing your own text-parsing in order to impose structure, which can be both brittle and cumbersome.