Question:
I have a script I am running in Powershell, and I want to be able to put a line in my resulting text file output between the ccript name and the script content itself.
Currently, from the below, the line $str_msg = $file,[System.IO.File]::ReadAllText($file.FullName) is what I need, but I need a line to separate $file and the result of the next expression. How can I do this?
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foreach ($file in [System.IO.Directory]::GetFiles($sqldir,"*.sql", [System.IO.SearchOption]::AllDirectories)) { $file = [System.IO.FileInfo]::new($file); $Log.SetLogDir(""); $str_msg = $file,[System.IO.File]::ReadAllText($file.FullName); $Log.AddMsg($str_msg); Write-Output $str_msg; # ... } |
Answer:
$str_msg = $file,[System.IO.File]::ReadAllText($file.FullName)doesn’t create a string, it creates a 2-element array ([object[]]), composed of the$file[System.IO.FileInfo]instance, and the string with the contents of that file.- Presumably, the
.AddMsg()method expects a single string, so PowerShell stringifies the array in order to convert it to a single string; PowerShell stringifies an array by concatenating the elements with a single space as the separator by default; e.g.:
[string] (1, 2)yields'1 2'.
Therefore, it’s best to compose $str_msg as a string to begin with, with an explicit newline as the separator, e.g.:
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$strMsg = "$file`r`n$([System.IO.File]::ReadAllText($file.FullName))" |
Note the use of escape sequence " to produce a CRLF, the Windows-specific newline sequence; on Unix-like platforms, you’d use just rn""`n" (LF).
.NET offers a cross-platform abstraction, [Environment]::NewLine, which returns the platform-appropriate newline sequence (which you could alternatively embed as $([Environment]::NewLine) inside "...").
An alternative to string interpolation is to use -f, the string-formatting operator, which is based on the .NET String.Format() method:
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$strMsg = '{0}{1}{2}' -f $file, [Environment]::NewLine, [System.IO.File]::ReadAllText($file.FullName) |