{"id":8441,"date":"2007-03-01T08:58:39","date_gmt":"2007-03-01T08:58:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/powershell\/2007\/03\/01\/year-of-the-pig-revisited-the-magic-of-ql\/"},"modified":"2019-02-18T13:16:53","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T20:16:53","slug":"year-of-the-pig-revisited-the-magic-of-ql","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/year-of-the-pig-revisited-the-magic-of-ql\/","title":{"rendered":"Year of the Pig Revisited – the magic of QL"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Siddaway has a blog entry<\/a> showing how to calculate the Chinese Horoscope using PowerShell. His solution uses hashtables:\n<\/p>\n

## create hash table<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/span>$years = @{1=”Rat”; 2=”Ox”; 3=”Tiger”; 4=”Rabbit”; 5=”Dragon”; 6=”Snake”;<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/span><\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\n\t\t\t<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>7=”Horse”; 8=”Goat”; 9=”Monkey”; 10=”Rooster”; 11=”Dog”; 0=”Pig”}<\/span><\/span>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/span>## get the year of interest<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/span>$y = Read-Host “Enter a year between 1900 and 2100 inclusive”<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/span>$anml = ($y – 1899)%12<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/span>Write-Host $years[$anml]<\/span><\/span>\n\t\t\t<\/span>
<\/span><\/span>\n\t<\/p>\n

This is a perfectly fine solution and a good one to help get hashtables in focus. Hashtables are super useful in scripting so if you aren’t real comfortable with them yet, you should take a few minutes to experiment and master them. That said, I’m a bad typist so I’m always looking for ways to do less typing. I noticed that index for this hash table is a number and that it started at 0. This immediately made me think of using an array instead. I then looked at all those quotes and remembered a great trick that Bruce Payette taught me:\n<\/p>\n

PS> function ql {$args}
PS> ql Pig Rat Ox Tiger Rabbit Dragon Snake Horse Goat Monkey Rooster Dog
Pig
Rat
Ox
Tiger
Rabbit
Dragon
Snake
Horse
Goat
Monkey
Rooster
Dog
\n\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

What that did was to take a list of arguments (note the lack of quotes) and returns them as an array (actually a stream which gets turned into an array). You’d have to go a REALLY long way to find a function with more utility per character than this one! So now the solution looks like this:\n<\/p>\n

## create hash table<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/span>$years = <\/span>ql Pig Rat Ox Tiger Rabbit Dragon Snake Horse Goat Monkey Rooster Dog
## get the year of interest<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/span>$y = Read-Host “Enter a year between 1900 and 2100 inclusive”<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/span>$anml = ($y – 1899)%12<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/span>Write-Host $years[$anml]<\/span>\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/span>
<\/span>\n\t<\/p>\n

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Windows PowerShell\/MMC Architect
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/PowerShell<\/a>
Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/technet\/scriptcenter\/hubs\/msh.mspx<\/a>\n\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Siddaway has a blog entry showing how to calculate the Chinese Horoscope using PowerShell. His solution uses hashtables: ## create hash table $years = @{1=”Rat”; 2=”Ox”; 3=”Tiger”; 4=”Rabbit”; 5=”Dragon”; 6=”Snake”; \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a07=”Horse”; 8=”Goat”; 9=”Monkey”; 10=”Rooster”; 11=”Dog”; 0=”Pig”} ## get the year of interest $y = Read-Host “Enter a year between 1900 and 2100 inclusive” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":600,"featured_media":13641,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-powershell"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Richard Siddaway has a blog entry showing how to calculate the Chinese Horoscope using PowerShell. His solution uses hashtables: ## create hash table $years = @{1=”Rat”; 2=”Ox”; 3=”Tiger”; 4=”Rabbit”; 5=”Dragon”; 6=”Snake”; \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a07=”Horse”; 8=”Goat”; 9=”Monkey”; 10=”Rooster”; 11=”Dog”; 0=”Pig”} ## get the year of interest $y = Read-Host “Enter a year between 1900 and 2100 inclusive” […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/600"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}