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

XML

At the moment, yq only supports decoding xml (into one of the other supported output formats).

As yaml does not have the concept of attributes, these are converted to regular fields with a prefix to prevent clobbering. 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