Whitespace and truncation with ellipsis on Select-Object - powershell

Question

I'm trying to figure out why Select-Object
adds a lot of whitespace at the start of its output; and
truncates long properties with ellipsis.
Here's a repro of what I mean. Suppose you run these commands on C:\:
New-Item "MyTest" -Type Directory
cd MyTest
"Some very long lorem ipsum like text going into a certain file, bla bla bla and some more bla." | Out-File test.txt
Get-ChildItem | Select-String "text" | Select-Object LineNumber,Line
This will show output like this:
The ellipsis I can understand, that would be just the way the command ends up getting formatted when the result is written to the console host. However, the whitespace at the start still confuses me in this case.
Things get weirder for me though when I pipe the result to either clip or Out-File output.txt. I get similarly formatted output, with a lot of whitespace at the start and truncated Line properties.
Which command is causing this behavior, and how can I properly solve this? Most importantly: how can I get the full results into a file or onto my clipboard?

Answer 1

The default behavior of outputting the data is to use Format-Table without any modifiers, and the default behavior of Format-Table is to split the viewport into columns of equal width. This makes no assumption on the output width, and is faster in that the cmdlet doesn't need to process any string data from the pipeline prior to output.
To reduce the whitespace, you should use Format-Table -AutoSize as the output method. The -AutoSize switch first measures the widths of data, then outputs with regard to calculated width. If you need to not receive ellipsis and always display the full data set, add -Wrap switch to Format-Table, this way the value will be wrapped into more than a single line, but you can copy it via selecting a square area in Powershell window, just strip newlines off the clipped contents.
Get-ChildItem | Select-String "text" | Select-Object LineNumber,Line | Format-Table -AutoSize -Wrap

Answer 2

I'd say the best way to get the full output into a file would be to export the result as a CSV:
Get-ChildItem |
Select-String "text" |
Select-Object LineNumber,Line |
Export-Csv 'out.csv'
You could also build a string from the selected properties, which might be better for copying the data to the clipboard:
Get-ChildItem |
Select-String "text" |
ForEach-Object { '{0}:{1}' -f $_.LineNumber, $_.Line } |
Tee-Object 'out.txt' | clip
The behavior you observed is caused by the way PowerShell displays output. Basically, it looks at the first object and counts the properties. Objects with less than 5 properties are sent to Format-Table, otherwise to Format-List. The columns of tabular output are spread evenly across the available space. As #Vesper already mentioned you can enforce proportional column width by using the -AutoSize parameter, and wrapping of long lines by using the -Wrap parameter. Format-List wraps long strings by default.
See this blog post from Jeffrey Snover for more information.