Parsing a text file or an html file to create a table - powershell

Question

I have a simple issue with a .msg file from outlook, but I discovered that with a code someone helped me with, it was not working since the htmlbody from the .msg file would vary between different emails even though they are from the same source, so my next option was to save the email as a .txt and .html file, since I have no knowledge of html I have no idea how to grab the table which is structured in the html with a . but on the text I found something easy, for example this is data from one table:
Summary
Date
Good mail
Rule matches
Spam
Malware
2019-10-22
4927
4519
2078
0
2019-10-23
4783
4113
1934
0
this is on the text file, Summary is the keyword, and after that key word, the next 5 lines are the columns of the table, after that ,each 5 lines following are the rows, this goes up to 7 rows in total, so headers and then 7 rows.
Now what I want to do is create a table from this text using the 5 first lines after summary as my columns. Since each .msg is different, this 5 columns will change order on each file randomly so I want to avoid this, my best attempt was to use convertfrom-string to create a table , but I have little idea on how to format the table with the conditions set above.
The problem I have is this simple, I have a table on the txt file shown as above, with 5 columns, each column besides the headers contains 7 rows, therei s also the condition that the email since it has more data, I need to stop there nad just grab that part which should be easy.
How can I use convertfrom-string to create the table using those 5 columns , how can I set the delimiter as a new line and how can I set the first 5 lines as the column headers?

Answer 1

I think trying to make this work with ConvertFrom-StringData is adding more work than necessary. But here is an alternative that works with your sample set.
$text = Get-Content -Path File.txt
$formattedText = if ($text[0] -match '^Summary') {
for ($i = 1; $i -lt $text.count; $i+=5 ) {
$text[$i..($i+4)] -join ','
}
}
$fomattedText | ConvertFrom-Csv | ConvertTo-Html
Explanation:
If we assume your text data is in File.txt, Get-Content is used to read the data as an array ($text). If the first line begins with Summary, the file will be parsed.
The for loop is used to skip 5 lines during each iteration until the end of the file. The for loop begins with $text values (indexes 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) joined together by a ,. Then the index increment ($i) is increased by 5 and the next five index values are joined together. Each increment will create a new line of comma separated values. The reason for the , join is just to use the simple ConvertFrom-Csv later.
ConvertFrom-Csv converts the CSV data into an array of objects ($formattedText) with the first row becoming those objects' properties.
Finally, the array is piped to ConvertTo-Html, which will output all of the objects in a table.
Note: If you want to resize or add extra format to the table, you may need to do that after the code is generated. If your data has commas, you will need a different delimiter when joining the strings. You will then need to add the -Delimiter parameter to the ConvertFrom-Csv with the delimiter you choose.
Adaptation:
The code is fairly flexible. If you need to work with more than five properties, the $i+=5 will need to reflect the number of properties you need to cycle through. The same change needs to apply to $text[$i..($i+4)]. You want the .. to separate two values that differ by your property number.