variable and array based on line of text

Question

The file i am trying to read looks like example below

variable, arrElement1, arrElement2, arrElemen3, arrelement[n]...
variable, arrElement1, arrElement2, arrElemen3, arrelement[n]...
.
.
.
variable, arrElement1, arrElement2, arrElemen3, arrelement[n]...

what i am trying to achieve is to read this file and assign "variable" as one element variable and arrElement's as array of elements

something like that:

:PseudoCode:

foreach (line in text file)
   $variable=variable
   $array = "arrElement1", "arrElement2", "arrElement3", ....
   foreach( $element in $array) {
      'do some stuff'
   }

thank you in advance

Ansgar Wiechers · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-21 11:32:26Z

1

Something like this should work:

Get-Content 'C:\your.txt' | % {
  $arr = $_ -split '\s*,\s*'
  New-Variable -Name $arr[0] -Value $arr[1..$arr.Length]
}

Edit: According to your pseudo code you meant to keep the first field in one variable and the rest of the fields as an array in the second variable. That's even simpler to achieve:

Get-Content 'C:\your.txt' | % {
  $var, $arr = $_ -split '\s*,\s*'
  $arr | % {
    # do stuff
  }
}

edited Sep 21, 2014 at 11:32

answered Sep 21, 2014 at 11:26

Ansgar Wiechers

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6 Comments

hermitagup Over a year ago

Oh, that looks quiet simple. On the beginning i was thinking about creating array with all elements and do for loop (starting from 2nd element in array). @Walter could you please comment one line of your code. I am not sure about what is really going on there. $var, $arr = $_ -split '\s*,\s*' looks like regex to me .. can't it be just ',' ? Thank you

Ansgar Wiechers Over a year ago

@hermitagup The name's Ansgar, not Walter. Yes, you could also use -split ',' instead of -split '\s*,\s*'. However, if you do that, the array values will retain all whitespace that was before/after the commas. For instance, splitting a string "a , b" like that would produce an array with the 2 strings "a " (with a trailing space) and " b" (with a leading space). The \s* in the splitting regexp prevent that.

hermitagup Over a year ago

@Ansgar, truly sorry about that mistake. Thank you for explaining me that part. I totally agree with your clever solution. Have a nice code.

walid toumi Over a year ago

@AnsgarWiechers: its better here to use [ ]* (ascii space only) instead to \s* (all unicode whitespace): to speed performance and to avoid matching \n or \f ...etc , or an other solution is to avoid using \s* and use Trim()

Ansgar Wiechers Over a year ago

@walidtoumi You'd need pretty large files for this to become a performance issue. A quick test with an input file of 1 million lines and 8 fields per line didn't show any significant difference between splitting at \s*,\s* and , (1:25 each). Reading the data from disk takes significantly longer than that.

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