Parse text file powershell

Besides Where-Object, you can also use match and regex operators to find the exact text you want. Get-Content is a highly versatile cmdlet that comes loaded with many options. Here are some things you can do with it. You may want to know the number of lines available in the file, so you can parse it accordingly. The code for that is:. Earlier, we saw how to choose the first few or last few lines using the Select-Object cmdlet. You can also get the same results using some of the built-in methods of Get-Content.

For that, you can add the Wait parameter, like this:. This command will continuously monitor the log file for the new lines that are getting added to it and will display the same to you. Thus, these are some of the different ways to read a text file in PowerShell. Do let us know if you know more ways to read the contents of a file in PowerShell. Home » Tutorials » How to read a text file in PowerShell quickly and easily.

Lavanya Rathnam is a professional writer of tech and financial blogs. Creative thinker, out of the boxer, content builder and tenacious researcher who specializes in explaining complex ideas to different audiences. Similar to T-SQL, we can use the replace function for measuring a string without characters. In the below examples, we see this being done with semicolons, vertical bars and periods.

We get the length of each of these strings without the chosen characters by using the replace method and length property. We can use the above logic to determine how many of each of these specific characters semicolons, vertical bars, and periods are in a string.

We can use this logic to get the right side of a string from a set of delimiters fourth example below this , as this passes in the final delimiter number which allows our Split method to return the final part of the string after the last delimiter. In using the Length property and Split and Replace methods, we can get the right or left side of a string from a delimiter. We can also use the Split method to get part of a string from a numbered delimiter, like we saw in some of the above examples.

We can use these same functions to get strings between two delimiters, which we see below this. Because we may sometimes forget which method to use or want a function that makes it easier to get this information faster for data, the below function allows us to get the below quickly from a line of characters where we want to extract data based on a character. It requires two parameters, the string and the character and allows us to make a selection with getting everything right or left to a character or parsing the string after a character by entering the Nth number of that character, if there are multiple instances of the character, and finally a possible parameter in case we want to get string between two identical characters.

IndexOf ",". Split "," [3]. Replace ",","". No action is necessary. Also, the dispose method does end the object, as we can check by calling the method from the command line in PowerShell ISE and it will return nothing we could also check within the function and get the same result :. For custom performance, StreamReader offers more potential, as we can read each line of data and apply our additional functions as we need.

Just be careful if the files tend to grow in time. Reading file stuff here. Substring 0 , IndexOf " ". Replace " " , "replace".

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In his free time, he is a contributor to the decentralized financial industry. View all posts by Timothy Smith.