Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting - Third Edition

Manipulating numbers

Basic mathematical operations in PowerShell make use of the operators discussed in Chapter 4, Operators.

Formatting numbers using the format operators are introduced, along with a number of features, as follows:

'{0:x}' -f 24244      # Lower-case hexadecimal. Returns 5eb4 
'{0:X}' -f 24244      # Upper-case hexadecimal. Returns 5EB4 
'{0:P}' -f 0.28232    # Percentage. Returns 28.23% 
'{0:N2}' -f 32583.122 # Culture specific number format. 
                      # 2 decimal places. 
                      # Returns 32,583.12 (for en-GB) 

The format operator is powerful, but it has one major shortcoming: it returns a string. It is great for when you want to display a number to a user, but will prevent sorting or work with the numeric form.