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

Converting strings to numeric values


In most cases, strings may be cast back to numeric values. For example:

[Int]"2"             # String to Int32 
[Decimal]"3.141"     # String to Decimal 
[UInt32]10           # Int32 to UInt32 
[SByte]-5            # Int32 to SByte 

For advanced conversions, the System.Convert class may be used. When exploring Base64 encoding, the Convert.To<NumericType> method was used. This method can take a string and convert it to a number using a specified base.

A binary, base 2, value is converted as follows:

[Convert]::ToInt32('01000111110101', 2)  # Returns 4597 

Or a hexadecimal value, base 16:

[Convert]::ToInt32('FF9241', 16)  # Returns 16749121 

Supported bases are 2 (binary), 8 (octal), 10 (denary), and 16 (hexadecimal).