Powershell removing columns and rows from CSV - powershell

Question

I'm having trouble making some changes to a series of CSV files, all with the same data structure. I'm trying to combine all of the files into one CSV file or one tab delimited text file (don't really mind), however each file needs to have 2 empty rows removed and two of the columns removed, below is an example:
col1,col2,col3,col4,col5,col6 <-remove
col1,col2,col3,col4,col5,col6 <-remove
col1,col2,col3,col4,col5,col6
col1,col2,col3,col4,col5,col6
^ ^
remove remove
End Result:
col1,col2,col4,col6
col1,col2,col4,col6
This is my attempt at doing this (I'm very new to Powershell)
$ListofFiles = "example.csv" #this is an list of all the CSV files
ForEach ($file in $ListofFiles)
{
$content = Get-Content ($file)
$content = $content[2..($content.Count)]
$contentArray = #()
[string[]]$contentArray = $content -split ","
$content = $content[0..2 + 4 + 6]
Add-Content '...\output.txt' $content
}
Where am I going wrong here...

Answer 1

your example file should be read, before foreach to fetch the file list
$ListofFiles = get-content "example.csv"
Inside the foreach you are getting content of mainfile
$content = Get-Content ($ListofFiles)
instead of
$content = Get-Content $file
and for removing rows i will recommend this:
$obj = get-content C:\t.csv | select -Index 0,1,3
for removing columns (column numbers 0,1,3,5):
$obj | %{(($_.split(","))[0,1,3,5]) -join "," } | out-file test.csv -Append

Answer 2

According to the fact the initial files looks like
col1,col2,col3,col4,col5,col6
col1,col2,col3,col4,col5,col6
,,,,,
,,,,,
You can also try this one liner
Import-Csv D:\temp\*.csv -Header 'C1','C2','C3','C4','C5','C6' | where {$_.c1 -ne ''} | select -Property 'C1','C2','C5' | Export-Csv 'd:\temp\final.csv' -NoTypeInformation
According to the fact that you CSVs have all the same structure, you can directly open them providing the header, then remove objects with the missing datas then export all the object in a csv file.

Answer 3

It is sufficient to specify fictitious column names, with a column number that can exceed the number of columns in the file, change where you want and exclude columns that you do not want to take.
gci "c:\yourdirwithcsv" -file -filter *.csv |
%{ Import-Csv $_.FullName -Header C1,C2,C3,C4,C5,C6 |
where C1 -ne '' |
select -ExcludeProperty C3, C4 |
export-csv "c:\temp\merged.csv" -NoTypeInformation
}