Professional Windows® PowerShell

Chapter 12. Processing Text

Windows PowerShell is designed primarily to work with .NET objects, but it also has enormous power and flexibility for the processing of text. In this chapter, I show you techniques that you can use to process text using Windows PowerShell commands and scripts.

If you have worked through earlier chapters, you will be aware that Windows PowerShell cmdlets emit objects and not strings. In that respect, Windows PowerShell cmdlets differ substantially from traditional executables such as those which form part of the traditional cmd.exe command shell. If you use Windows PowerShell cmdlets, you need to be able to process the objects those cmdlets emit. However, from the Windows PowerShell command shell, you can also use traditional applications that emit strings. If you use those applications and utilities and need to process the strings they emit, then the string manipulation capabilities of Windows PowerShell may be very useful. Textual data arises from many other sources, and you will likely at some time want to manipulate text using at least some of the techniques I show you in this chapter. If you commonly manipulate text data, you will use these techniques regularly when you use PowerShell.