Powershell Pipe to Switch Statement to format a phone number - powershell

Question

I am attempting to query AD to get the phone number for a user then format it to a standard format (###-####). I'm using a Switch statement because I've seen the number in a handful of different formats. With the way I have my code set up though I am getting an error: "The term Switch is not recognized as a name of a cmdlet, function, script file..."
Here's the code:
$ADInfo = Get-ADUser $User.Email.split("#")[0] -Properties * -Server $DC
$User.'Phone Number' = $ADInfo.telephoneNumber | Switch -regex ($_) {
'^\d{5}$'
{
"{0:38#-####}" -f $_
break
}
'^\d{7}$'
{
"{0:###-####}" -f $_
break
}
default
{
break
}
}
Am I misunderstanding how the pipeline works? I suppose I could just save this info to a temp variable and then enter a Switch statement but this seemed like an effective way to use the pipeline.
Anyhow, any help is appreciated! Thanks!

Answer 1

Am I misunderstanding how the pipeline works?
Yes.
The pipeline can only pipe stuff to commands - and switch is not a command, it's a language keyword.
You can wrap your switch statement in a ForEach-Object block and pipe the input to that:
$User.'Phone Number' = $ADInfo.telephoneNumber | ForEach-Object {
Switch -regex ($_) {
'^\d{5}$'
{
"{0:38#-####}" -f $_
}
'^\d{7}$'
{
"{0:###-####}" -f $_
}
}
}
As Ansgar points out, the break statements here are redundant (and not required), since your test cases are mutually exclusive

Answer 2

As suggested by Mathias R. Jessen, here's an example of how to use Switch without having to iterate through things with a ForEach loop, or piping anything to it.
Switch will iterate an array on its own, so there's no need to nest it in a loop, or even pipe anything in this case. It can be done as such:
$ADInfo = Get-ADUser $User.Email.split("#")[0] -Properties * -Server $DC
$User.'Phone Number' = Switch -regex ($ADInfo.telephoneNumber) {
'^\d{5}$'
{
"{0:38#-####}" -f $_
}
'^\d{7}$'
{
"{0:###-####}" -f $_
}
}
Aside from that I would recommend using Continue instead of Break. Further example of when continue would be used within the Switch scriptblock:
$TestData = #('John.Doe#Company.Com','JDoe','[phone]','Taco Tuesday')
Switch -regex ($TestData){
'#' {"$_ is an email address.";continue}
'^[+()\-\d\s]+$' {"$_ is a phone number.";continue}
default {"$_ is unknown."}
}
Here we have something being done in the default block, so we want to include a continue statement in the previous cases so that if a match is found it moves to the next item in the array, and does not execute the default case. The output of that would be:
John.Doe#Company.com is an email address.
JDoe is unknown.
[phone] is a phone number.
Taco Tuesday is unknown.