powershell weirdly encodes ampersands when I try to set the value to an xml attribute

Question

In my build script, I have a helper powershell function as below: ``` function set-connectionstring { param($path, $name, $value) $settings = [xml](get-content $path) $setting = $settings.configuration.connectionStrings.add | where { $_.name -eq $name } $setting.connectionString = "$value" $setting.providerName = "System.Data.SqlClient" $resolvedPath = resolve-path($path) $settings.save($resolvedPath) } ``` It works great except that when I try to set the value, it encodes ampersands weirdly. Here is the issue: Inside my connection string I have `&quot` value. This should be perfectly valid. However, my above code transforms this into `&quot;` which is totally unreasonable. Do you have any idea I can solve this problem?

Accepted Answer

Have you try to `decode` your connection string first? Here is sample:

```
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.web")
[System.Web.HttpUtility]::HtmlDecode(""")
```

powershell weirdly encodes ampersands when I try to set the value to an xml attribute

Solution

Problem