Displaying user inputs with powershell - powershell

Question

say I have an array
$something = #(
"first",
"second"
)
how can I display this to the user as
1. first
2. second
Selection :
I am able to do this by hash table and manually mapping
#{
1="first"
2="second"
};
and doing the following
$something.Keys | sort |% { Write-Host $_ ")" $something.Item($_) }
[int32]$constuctPayload.Action = Read-Host
but if need to perform this using an array how can I do this. I.e looping over the item and displaying with index for user selection. ?

Answer 1

You could use the IndexOf() method, to find the index in the array.
$something | ForEach-Object {Write-Host "$([Array]::IndexOf($something, $_)). $_ "}
Standard warning about being careful with Write-Host. Also you might want to look into Out-GridView.

Answer 2

Use a for loop to iterate over the elements of the array and prepend each value with the index + 1.
$something = 'first', 'second'
for ($i = 0; $i -lt $something.Count; $i++) {
Write-Host ('{0}. {1}' -f ($i+1), $something[$i])
}
[int32]$constuctPayload.Action = Read-Host -Prompt 'Selection'
I would recommend using the PromptForChoice() method over Read-Host, though:
$something = '&first', '&second'
$title = 'The title.'
$msg = 'Selection?'
$choices = $something | ForEach-Object {
New-Object Management.Automation.Host.ChoiceDescription $_
}
$options = [Management.Automation.Host.ChoiceDescription[]] $choices
$default = 0
$constuctPayload.Action = $Host.UI.PromptForChoice($title, $msg, $options, $default)