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


PowerShell has a variety of commands that can convert strings. These are explained in the following sections.

Working with Base64

Base64 is a transport encoding that is used to represent binary data and therefore any (relatively simple) data type.

Base64 is particularly useful when storing complex strings in files, or in text-based transport protocols such as SMTP.

The .NET class System.Convert contains static methods that can be used to work with base64:

  • ToBase64String
  • FromBase64String

Two further methods exist to work with character arrays, these are not discussed here.

The ToBase64String method takes an array of bytes and converts it into a string. For example, a simple byte array may be converted:

PS> [Byte[]]$bytes = 97, 98, 99, 100, 101
[Convert]::ToBase64String($bytes)

YWJjZGU=

A more meaningful byte sequence can be made from a few words by getting the byte values for each character:

PS> $bytes = [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes('Hello world')
[Convert]::ToBase64String...