yq/pkg/yqlib/doc/usage/headers/xml.md

XML

Encode and decode to and from XML. Whitespace is not conserved for round trips - but the order of the fields are.

As yaml does not have the concept of attributes, xml attributes are converted to regular fields with a prefix to prevent clobbering. This defaults to "+", use the --xml-attribute-prefix to change.

Consecutive xml nodes with the same name are assumed to be arrays.

All values in XML are assumed to be strings - but you can use from_yaml to parse them into their correct types:

yq e -p=xml '.myNumberField |= from_yaml' my.xml

XML nodes that have attributes then plain content, e.g:

<cat name="tiger">meow</cat>

The content of the node will be set as a field in the map with the key "+content". Use the --xml-content-name flag to change this.