Category: Powershell

Patrick Gruenauer takes us through null checking in Powershell:

Null is null. Dividing by zero is not allowed, say the mathematicians. What about null in PowerShell? Is null equal empty? What is $null? Why a method IsNullOrEmpty? In this blog post I will shed some on this and provide you with some examples to understand the differences between null and null or empty.

Read on for the full story.

Jeffrey Hicks solves an interesting problem:

A few weeks ago my friend, Gladys Kravitz, was lamenting about a challenge related to filtering for unique objects. PowerShell has a Get-Unique cmdlet, and Select-Object has a -Unique parameter, but these options are limited. On one hand, I’d say most things we manage with PowerShell are guaranteed to be unique. Objects might have a GUID , ID, or SID, to guarantee uniqueness. But, and this is Gladys’ situation, sometimes the things we are managing come from an external source. Such as importing data from a CSV file. In this situation, it is definitely possible to have duplicate objects.

This turns out to be a bit harder than expected.

Robert Cain shows off some features around strings in Powershell:

PowerShell has some of the best, most flexible string handling of any language I’ve used. In this post we’ll look at some string basics, then some of the features that make it special.

Note in these demos I’m using PowerShell Core 7.1.3 and VSCode. Everything here should also work in the PowerShell 5.1 and the PowerShell IDE.

Read on for types of strings, embedded quotations, string interpolation, and more.

Phil Factor has a bit of Powershell for us:

How do you list all the objects and values within a PowerShell object, investigate an object or explore its structure? There must be a simple way. I used to use ConvertTo-JSON. This is fine up to a point but what if you just wish to search for strings or look for objects with a cartain name or value? What if you need their path so you can reference them? It isn’t plain-sailing. In the ISE, the intellisense will help you a lot but I want more and I want to do it in script rather than the IDE

Read on to check it out and get a copy of the cmdlet.

Patrick Gruenauer shows off the Trim series of methods in Powershell:

In PowerShell it’s easy to manipulate strings, especially to cut off some characters from a string. These three methods are your friends when it comes to trimming: Trim, TrimStart and TrimEnd. In this blog post I will show you how to use PowerShell to manipulate strings and cut off something at the beginning and at the end. I will also try to give you some useful practical examples in hand to convince you that it’s worth to learn something about string manipulation. Let’s hop in.

Click through for examples of these three methods and how they do more than removing whitespace.

Chad Callihan shows us how to update the dbatools Powershell module:

The first sentence on the dbatools download page references the belief in releasing early and releasing often. While SQL Server and SQL Server Management Studio may get a handful up dates every year, dbatools averages a few every month. Fortunately, staying up to date with dbatools is easily manageable as we’ll see below.

Read on to see how you can tell which version of the module you have and then how to update it.

Phil Factor has unleashed the full power of XML:

I want to convert reasonably small XML files to hash tables and PowerShell objects. PowerShell never had a ConvertFrom-XML Cmdlet because gulping a large XML file into a PowerShell data object is expensive in resources. It is the sheer time it takes to consume a large XML file. Instead, you have to use the XMLDocument object to navigate to the data you want or use an Xpath query. It is all well and good to handle XML in this way, but it is inconsistent to have no ConvertFrom-XML cmdlet. After all, there is a ConvertFrom cmdlet for CSV, JSON, and a variety of text-based data. It would be good to have one for XML as well. Usually, I just want to consume relatively small XML files and just pick out the data I want. I hoped that one that worked would turn up but somehow it never did. So I wrote my own.

Click through for that script, as well as some considerations about using it.