Hey, Scripting Guy! How Can I Use Windows PowerShell to Create a Text File with Fixed-Length Lines?

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The script is designed to read a text file that contains lines of varying lengths, and shorten the lines to a specific length (9 characters, in this example). If the line is shorter than 9 characters, that is okay and there is no requirement for line padding. The text file in question is shown in the following image. After the script has run, the text file shown in the following image is created. To translate this script to Windows PowerShell requires very little effort. The key things to remember are that in Windows PowerShell new objects are created by the New-Object cmdlet, and that variables have a dollar sign in front of them. Oh yeah, the Do…Until loop does not have a loop command. One of the key tricks to making a translated VBScript is getting the ability to use the VBScript functions. Windows PowerShell does not have a Left command that is used for string manipulation. It has a substring method from the .NET Framework string class. To gain access to the VBScript string functions, load the microsoft.visualbasic assembly by using the Add-Type cmdlet (in Windows PowerShell 1.0, you used the reflections.assembly .NET Framework class). To make using Left easier, create an alias for the microsoft.visualbasic.strings .NET Framework class. These two commands are shown here:

In VBScript, there were two concatenation operators: the + and the &. In Windows PowerShell, there is only the + character. In VBScript, you had the VBCRLF operator; Windows PowerShell uses “`r`n” to accomplish the same thing. To make the script as similar to the VBScript as possible, I created the variable $VbCrLf and set it equal to “`r`n” as shown here:

The complete ShortenLinesInTextFileTransFmVBS.ps1 script is shown here. ShortenLinesInTextFileTransFmVBS.ps1

Another way to write this script that takes advantage of some of the features of Windows PowerShell is seen in the CreateFileWithLinesOfSpecificLength.ps1 script. I decided to add one improvement to the script, and that is to make a backup copy of the file before modifying the original text file. After assigning the path to the file, I use the Rename-Item cmdlet to rename the original file to hsg62810.txt.old. To do that, I take advantage of the expanding string feature in Windows PowerShell. When a variable is placed inside double quotation marks, it automatically expands to display the value that is contained inside the variable. This makes it really easy to do things such as append new file extensions to original file names. This is shown here inside the Windows PowerShell console where the path is assigned to the $file variable, and then the file with a new extension is displayed. Note that this does not assign a new value to the $file variable, but just displays a string with .old appended to it. This is shown here:

To read the contents of a text file, I like to use the Get-Content cmdlet. Because I renamed the original file to hsg62810.txt.old, I use the string “$file.old” as the path to the file. The Get-Content cmdlet returns an array of strings. This array of strings is sent down the pipeline to the Foreach-Object cmdlet. In the Foreach-Object cmdlet, the if statement is used to check the length of each line as it comes down the pipeline. The $_ automatic variable is used as a placeholder in the Foreach-Object cmdlet to allow us to work with the lines of text as they come down the pipeline. Each line of text is an instance of the system.string .NET Framework class, which has a length property that indicates how many letters are in the string. If the length is less than or equal to (-le operator) 9 characters, the line of text is added to the newly created hsg2810.txt file. The new file will be automatically created by the Add-Content cmdlet. The text that is written to the file is the string represented by the $_ variable. This section of the script is shown here:

If the line of text is longer than 9 characters, the system.string substring method is used to return the first 9 characters from the line. There are two parameters for the substring method. The first one is the starting position, and the second parameter is the number of characters to return. This is very similar to the VBScript function mid. An example of using the VBScript function mid is shown here:

The same substring command is shown here. You will notice that Windows PowerShell begins numbering at 0 for the starting position:

The cool thing is that because everything in Windows PowerShell is an object, a string is in reality already an instance of the system.string .NET Framework class. This means the substring method is immediately available on any string. You do not even have to put parentheses around the string first. This is shown here:

The Add-Content cmdlet automatically appends to a text file, and there is no need to add any special parameters to cause this action. The line from the script that selects nine characters from the beginning of the line of text on the pipeline and writes it to the text file is shown here:

The complete CreateFileWithLinesOfSpecificLength.ps1 script is shown here. CreateFileWithLinesOfSpecificLength.ps1

RS, that is all there is to using Windows PowerShell to create a file with fixed-length lines. String Migration Week will continue tomorrow. If you want to know exactly what we will be looking at tomorrow, follow us on Twitter or Facebook. If you have any questions, send e-mail to us at scripter@microsoft.com, or post your questions on the Official Scripting Guys Forum. See you tomorrow. Until then, peace.
Ed Wilson and Craig Liebendorfer, Scripting Guys

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