Chapter 6. PowerShell and the Internet
PowerShell interacts really well with the Webâitâs able to access files, XML, JSON, web
services, and more directly from the Internet. PowerShell does not have cURL (http://bit.ly/9mSnL7) or GNU Wget (http://bit.ly/XAhQh) support out of
the box, but because it is an amazing glue language that is deeply integrated with the .NET
Framework, one area where its capabilities really shine is in connecting a set of powerful
underlying components. PowerShell v3 makes this even easier using the cmdlets Invoke-WebRequest, Invoke-RestMethod, ConvertTo-Json, and ConvertFrom-Json.
Itâs interesting to note that, even though PowerShell was envisioned over a decade ago and v2 was delivered back in 2009, it is able to keep pace with daily development needs.
Taking advantage over the Web of something like JavaScript Object Notation (JSON; http://bit.ly/1HwvBY), a lightweight data-interchange format, is easy using .NET libraries designed to parse it and present it in a way thatâs consumable by PowerShell.
In this chapter, Iâll demonstrate code that will let you pull down differently formatted information from websites. The amount of public information available is enormous. Contributed by individuals, companies, and governments, these huge datasets can give us insight into myriad subjects and can be easily accessed via PowerShell.
Net.WebClient
One cool PowerShell demo I like to give is showing how to pull down the details of a blogâs RSS feed (http://bit.ly/QWNVt ...
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