April 2, 2009 / by Jeffery Hicks / Windows PowerShell / 1 Comment

Out-CSV

Sometimes it’s the little things that can make life easier. Here’s one of them. We know that PowerShell treats comma separated items as an array:

PS C:\> $a=”a”,1,”b”,”jeff”,4

PS C:\> $a
a
1
b
jeff
4
PS C:\>

But what if you want back in its original comma delimited list? Or suppose you wanted to create a comma delimited line of all running services? Export-CSV isn’t really going to help in these situations. I came up with function called Out-CSV.

Function out-csv {
BEGIN { 
   #probably not necessary
    [string]$csv=""
}
PROCESS {
   #force each item to be a string and trim any spaces
   $item=($_ | out-string).Trim()
   if ($csv) {
     $csv+="," + $item
   }
   else {
     #first item in the string
     $csv=$item
   }
 }
END {
  #send the comma separated string into the pipeline
    write $csv 
 }
}

The function uses the Begin/Process/End script blocks so it can accept pipelined input. The function is pretty simple. It merely concatenates each item into a comma delimited string.

PS C:\> $a | out-csv
a,1,b,jeff,4

Out-CSV needs strings so to work with other cmdlets takes a little extra work.

PS C:\> get-service | where {$_.status -eq “running”} | foreach {$_.name} | out-csv

This will create comma separated list of all running services.Granted, the need for such a list may be limited but if you need it, now you have a tool to get it.

Download the script file here.

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