Insert blank columns into csv with Powershell - powershell

Question

In my script, I am building a custom Powershell object which will be sent to Export-Csv. The receiving party has required that I include some blank columns (no data and no header) and I have no idea how to do that.
If the object looks like this:
$obj = [PSCustomObject][ordered]#{
EMPLOYER_EIN = '123456'
ACTION_CODE = 1
LAST_NAME = Smith
FIRST_NAME = John
MIDDLE_INITIAL = $null
EMPLOYEE_SSN = '111-11-1111'
}
How can I have the resulting .csv file's first row look like this:
EMPLOYER_EIN,ACTION_CODE,,LAST_NAME,FIRST_NAME,MIDDLE_INITIAL,,EMPLOYEE_SSN
Put another way, after I run Export-Csv, I want the file to look like this when opened in Excel:
EMPLOYER_EIN
ACTION_CODE
LAST_NAME
FIRST_NAME
MIDDLE_INITIAL
EMPLOYEE_SSN
123456
1
Smith
John
111-11-1111
Note the extra columns between action_code/last_name and middle_initial/employee_ssn. I am using PS 5.1 but could use 7 if necessary.

Answer 1

As a test, I created a CSV test.csv with fields A,B, and C, and put a couple of lines of values:
"A","B","C"
1,2,3
4,5,6
I then executed the sequence of commands
Import-CSV -path Test.csv | Select-Object -Prop A," ",B,C | Export-CSV -Path test2.csv
and looked at the resultant test2.csv, which contained
#TYPE Selected.System.Management.Automation.PSCustomObject
"A"," ","B","C"
"1",,"2","3"
"4",,"5","6"
I believe that this is going to be the closest you'll get without manually processing the CSV as a text file.
This is essentially what Santiago Squarzon was suggesting in the comments.
If you need multiple "blank" columns, each one will have to have a header with a different non-zero number of spaces.

Answer 2

I suggest:
constructing the object with blank dummy properties with a shared name prefix, such as BLANK_, followed by a sequence number (the property names must be unique)
initially piping to ConvertTo-Csv, which allows use of a -replace operation to replace the dummy property names with empty strings in the first output line (the header line).
the result - which already is in CSV format - can then be saved to a CSV file with Set-Content.
$obj = [PSCustomObject] #{
EMPLOYER_EIN = '123456'
ACTION_CODE = 1
BLANK_1 = $null # first dummy property
LAST_NAME = 'Smith'
FIRST_NAME = 'John'
MIDDLE_INITIAL = $null
BLANK_2 = $null # second dummy property
EMPLOYEE_SSN = '111-11-1111'
}
$first = $true
$obj |
ConvertTo-Csv |
ForEach-Object {
if ($first) { # header row: replace dummy property names with empty string
$first = $false
$_ -replace '\bBLANK_\d+'
}
else { # data row: pass through
$_
}
} # pipe to Set-Content as needed.
Output (note the blank column names after ACTION CODE and MIDDLE_INITIAL):
"EMPLOYER_EIN","ACTION_CODE","","LAST_NAME","FIRST_NAME","MIDDLE_INITIAL","","EMPLOYEE_SSN"
"123456","1",,"Smith","John",,,"111-11-1111"