export object using Export-Csv doesn't work - powershell

Question

I'm trying to export the username and the user's group membership (of specifc groups) to a CSV file using Export-Csv. However, I couldn't accomplish this using several approaches.
My current script works fine but the output is shown on the PowerShell console alone:
$accounts = Get-Content "C:\Scripts\getUserGroups\users.txt"
foreach ($account in $accounts) {
"$account member of:"
Get-ADPrincipalGroupMembership -Identity $account |
select Name |
Where-Object { $_.name -like 'Browsing_Group*' } |
Sort Name
}
I want to export it to a file in an ordered manner:
UserName1
group membership
UserName2
group membership
etc...
I've tried to add to a variable but probably didn't do that correctly:
$ArrList = [System.Collections.ArrayList]#()
$accounts = Get-Content "C:\Scripts\getUserGroups\users.txt"
foreach ($account in $accounts) {
$ArrList.Add($account)
$groups = Get-ADPrincipalGroupMembership -Identity $account |
select Name |
Where-Object {$_.name -like 'Browsing_group*' } |
Sort Name
$ArrList.Add($grops)
}
Might be a different approach.

Answer 1

You need to build custom objects in order to export the data to a CSV via Export-Csv. The 2 main ways of doing that are:
using calculated properties:
$accounts |
Select-Object #{n='Username';e={$_}}, #{n='Groups';e={
(Get-ADPrincipalGroupMembership -Identity $_ |
Select-Object -Expand Name |
Where-Object {$_ -like 'Browsing_group*' } |
Sort-Object) -join ';'
}} |
Export-Csv 'C:\path\to\output.csv' -NoType
building custom objects directly:
$accounts | ForEach-Object {
$groups = Get-ADPrincipalGroupMembership -Identity $_ |
Select-Object -Expand Name |
Where-Object {$_ -like 'Browsing_group*' } |
Sort-Object
New-Object -Type PSObject -Property #{
'Username' = $_
'Groups' = $groups -join ';'
}
} | Export-Csv 'C:\path\to\output.csv' -NoType
With PowerShell version 3 or newer you can replace New-Object with the [PSCustomObject] type accelerator:
[PSCustomObject]#{
'Username' = $_
'Groups' = $groups -join ';'
}