Book Image

Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting (Second Edition) - Second Edition

By : Brenton J.W. Blawat
Book Image

Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting (Second Edition) - Second Edition

By: Brenton J.W. Blawat

Overview of this book

PowerShell scripts offer a handy way to automate various chores. Working with these scripts effectively can be a difficult task. This comprehensive guide starts from scratch and covers advanced-level topics to make you a PowerShell expert. The first module, PowerShell Fundamentals, begins with new features, installing PowerShell on Linux, working with parameters and objects, and also how you can work with .NET classes from within PowerShell. In the next module, you’ll see how to efficiently manage large amounts of data and interact with other services using PowerShell. You’ll be able to make the most of PowerShell’s powerful automation feature, where you will have different methods to parse and manipulate data, regular expressions, and WMI. After automation, you will enter the Extending PowerShell module, which covers topics such as asynchronous processing and, creating modules. The final step is to secure your PowerShell, so you will land in the last module, Securing and Debugging PowerShell, which covers PowerShell execution policies, error handling techniques, and testing. By the end of the book, you will be an expert in using the PowerShell language.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

String manipulation


The .NET type System.String offers a wide array of methods for manipulating or inspecting strings. The following methods are case sensitive, but are in many cases faster alternatives to using regular expressions if the time it takes for a script to run is important.

Working with data held in strings is an important part of any scripting language.

Indexing into strings

In PowerShell, it is possible to index into a string the same way as selecting elements from an array. For example:

$myString = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz' 
$myString[0]     # This is a (the first character in the string) 
$myString[-1]    # This is z (the last character in the string)

String methods and arrays

In PowerShell, some string methods can be called on an array. The method will be executed against each of the elements in the array. For example, the trim method is used against each of the strings:

('azzz', 'bzzz', 'czzz').Trim('z') 

The split method is also capable of acting against an array:

('a,b', 'c...