Get-Content & combine "continued lines" - powershell

Question

I have a txt file pulled into an array using Get-Content which uses _ as the line continue token, and the number of continued lines can be anything from one to many. So the text might look like this...
Jrn.Directive "DocSymbol" _
, "[Commercial-Default.rte]"
Jrn.Directive "GlobalToProj" _
, "[Commercial-Default.rte]", "Floor Plan: Level 1" _
, 0.01041666666667 _
, 1.00000000000000, 0.00000000000000, 0.00000000000000 _
, 0.00000000000000, 1.00000000000000, 0.00000000000000 _
, 0.00000000000000, 0.00000000000000, 1.00000000000000 _
, 0.00000000000000, 0.00000000000000, 0.00000000000000
I would like to reformat without line wrapping, and I am wondering if there is some super elegant approach to this I am not seeing? Because what i see as the way forward is a foreach $line in $array, and if the line EndsWith("") set a start index to the lines index, then search forward till a line doesn't EndsWith("") and set an end index, combine the bits and write to a temporary array, then skip the difference between the two indexes as the main loop continues to read lines. If that makes sense without some more detailed pseudo code.
In any case, it seems clumsy and inelegant, and I wonder if there is a better approach?
My initial thought was that Get-Content might have something built in, but it looks like the only delimiter you can define is End of Line (defaults to \n).
So, based on Anthony's input, and realizing that I needed to combine lines first, THEN remove irrelevant lines (that may have been multiple lines to start with) I now have this.
$target = 'Z:\Support\Px 3.0\RFO Benchmark\Journal Cleanup\journal.0010.txt'
$cleanFile = 'Z:\Support\Px 3.0\RFO Benchmark\Journal Cleanup\journal.0010.CLEAN.txt'
$sourceFile = Get-Content $target
$cleanData = #()
function Relavant {
[CmdletBinding()]
param (
[string]$line
)
$irrelevant = #('Jrn.Directive “Username"', 'Jrn.Directive "IdleTimeTaskSymbol"', 'Jrn.Directive "WindowSize"', 'Jrn.Size')
foreach ($item in $irrelevant) {
if ($line.StartsWith($item)) {
$relevant = $false
} else {
$relevant = $true
}
}
$relevant
}
$string = ''
$continue = $false
$tempData = $(foreach ($line in $tempData) {
if ($line -match '^[^,]') {
$string = ''
$continue = $true
}
if ($continue) {
$string += $line
}
if ($line.EndsWith('_')) {
$continue = $true
} else {
$continue = $false
$string -replace '\s?_'
}
})
# Remove comments & irrelevant lines and do basic formatting
foreach ($line in $tempData) {
$line = $line.Trim()
if (-not ($line.StartsWith("'"))) {
if (Relavant $line) {
$line = $line -replace " ,", ","
$line = $line -replace '\s+', ' '
$cleanData += $line
}
}
}
Add-Content $cleanFile "' Cleaned by PxJournalCleaner`n"
foreach ($line in $cleanData) {
Add-Content $cleanFile $line
}
It's working well, but I suspect I will implement it again with the alternative approach just for the education factor if nothing else. I'm also not sure I fully understand what's going on in Anthony's approach, so I obviously still have some poking around to do. Thanks all!

Answer 1

you should probably make the regex matches a little more precise, but it worked for me
$file = gc 'C:\temp\new 1.txt'
$string = ''
$cont = $false
$result = $(foreach ($line in $file) {
if ($line -match '^[^,]') {
$string = ''
$cont = $true
}
if ($cont) {
$string += $line
}
if ($line.EndsWith('_')) {
$cont = $true
} else {
$cont = $false
$string -replace '\s?_'
}
})
$result

Answer 2

Your approach seems totally fine, although I would probably just do it one line at a time.
You could do something like:
# read the wrapped lines from file
$lines = Get-Content C:\yourfile.txt
# initialize an array with a single empty string + a cursor that we'll use to keep track of the last index
$unwrappedLines = ,""
$cursor = 0
# iterate over the input strings
foreach($line in $lines){
if($line.EndsWith(" _")){
# Line is to be continued, remove line continuation character and add the rest of the string to the current index in our new array
$unwrappedLines[$cursor] += $line.Substring(0,$line.Length - 2)
}
else
{
# Line is not to be continued, add value as-is to current index
$unwrappedLines[$cursor] += $line
# Then increment our index cursor and initalize the next string in the array
$unwrappedLines[++$cursor] = ""
}
}

Answer 3

If the file is small enough just read this in as one string and replace all the _newlines with nothing.
(Get-Content -Raw "c:\temp\test.txt") -replace "_`r`n"
-Raw works in 3.0. If you don't have that then Out-String to the rescue.
(Get-Content "c:\temp\test.txt" | Out-String) -replace "_`r`n"
Just need to find any underscore that is followed by a new line and remove it.