Split property value in Powershell - powershell

Question

I am currently trying to do an Out-GridView to get a simple overview about our group policy objects. To do so, I am using the Get-GPO cmdlet, like so:
Get-GPO -all |
Select-Object -Property DisplayName, Description |
Sort-Object -Property DisplayName |
Out-GridView
In our company we use the first line of the description field to store the name of the admin who created the policy, and all following lines hold a short description.
I would want to be able to grab the first line of the the Description field with the column header Responsability and all other lines of the field in a separate column. So assuming my current code would give me a table like this:
DisplayName | Description
-------------------------
GPO1 | Username
| stuff
| stuff
I would want it to look like this:
DisplayName | Responsability | Description
------------------------------------------
GPO1 | Username | stuff
| | stuff
How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

As #Matt suggested, you can use a calculated property.
Then since Description is a string, rather than an array of strings, you will need to split the line at the line breaks. This can be done by using -split and since it's information from a GPO we can assume Windows line endings `r`n (Otherwise you could use [environment]::newline)
The first property, use array element [0] will be the first line. For the second property, we'll need to save the array in a variable. Then we can use the length of that variable to get first element through the last.
Get-GPO -all |
Select-Object -Property DisplayName, #{
Name = "Responsibility"
Expression = {($_.Description -split "`r`n")[0]}
}, #{
Name = "Description"
Expression = {
$linearray = ($_.Description -split "`r`n")
$linearray[1..($linearray.length - 1)] | Out-String
}
} |
Sort-Object -Property DisplayName |
Out-GridView
Alternatively, you could create a new object rather than using the calculated property.
Get-GPO -all |
ForEach-Object {
$linearray = ($_.Description -split "`r`n")
[pscustomobject]#{
"DisplayName" = $_.DisplayName
"Responsibility"= $linearray[0]
"Description" = $linearray[1..($linearray.length - 1)] | Out-String
}
} |
Sort-Object -Property DisplayName |
Out-GridView

Answer 2

The first thing to understand is what Get-GPO is returning: an array of objects, each of which has a set of properties.
What is displayed in your table is a series of rows (one per object), with the columns being the values of the properties for that object.
Therefore if you want a new column, you need a new property.
There are two ways you can do this: create a calculated property with Select-Object or add a property to the objects via Add-Member.
Calculated
You may provide a hashtable as a property to Select-Object, and the hashtable must have two keys:
Name (the name of the property)
Expression (a scriptblock that will be executed to determine the value, where $_ refers to the object itself)
Get-GPO -all |
Select-Object -Property DisplayName, Description, #{
Name = 'Responsibility'
Expression = {
($_.Description -split '\r?\n')[0] # First line
}
} |
Sort-Object -Property DisplayName |
Out-GridView
New Member
You can use a ScriptProperty that will execute a scriptblock each time the property is called on the object. Use $this to refer to the object in this context.
Get-GPO -all |
Add-Member -MemberType ScriptProperty -Name Responsibility -Value {
($this.Description -split '\r?\n')[0] # First line
} -Force -PassThru |
Select-Object -Property DisplayName, Responsibility, Description |
Sort-Object -Property DisplayName |
Out-GridView

Answer 3

I would probably use something like this:
Get-GPO -All | ForEach-Object {
$info = $_.Description
$pos = $info.IndexOf([Environment]::NewLine)
if ( $pos -gt 0 ) {
$responsibility = $info.Substring(0,$pos)
$description = $info.Substring($pos + [Environment]::NewLine.Length)
}
else {
$responsibility = ""
$description = $info
}
[PSCustomObject] #{
"DisplayName" = $_.DisplayName
"Responsibility" = $responsibility
"Description" = $description
}
}
This way you can preserve formatting.