Out-file format - powershell

Question

I am writing a script that after each iteration through a loop (array of selected services) it will gather the 4 values for each service that are: server name, service name, service state, and service start name
So for each iteration, I would like to output the 4 mentioned values to an external file (txt, svc, or html) such that each value will be arranged in its own column. Currently I use tab `t to arrange the values in each column but it doesn't work quite well because some service name is a lot longer or a lot shorter so it screws up the column alignment. What other approach do you suggest so all columns are aligned properly
Below is a snippet of my script on how I currently format the output to a txt file
ForEach($service in services)
$startname = $service.startname
$state = $service.state
$servicename = $service.name
write-output "$server `t $servicename `t $state `t $startname is current" | out-file -append $ScriptDirectory

Answer 1

If you just want to dump the results to text in a nicely-formatted way (i.e. you don't have requirements for making this CSV, or tab-delimited, or anything else besides "easy for a person to read"), then just use Format-Table -AutoSize.
AutoSize does exactly what you want - it inspects the length of all properties you are outputting, then dynamically adjusts the column width so that as much as possible is shown.
You don't explain where $server comes from, I will assume that is defined somewhere else...
$services `
| Format-Table -AutoSize #{N='Server';E={$server}},StartName,State,Name `
| Out-String `
| Out-File results.txt

Answer 2

Instead of using several variables, use a Powershell object to store your output. Something like this:
ForEach($service in $services) {
New-Object PSObject -Property #{
StartName = $service.startname
State = $service.state
ServiceName = $service.name
}
} | Out-File $ScriptDirectory
You may need to add a Select-Object in the chain to ensure the columns are in the correct order that you want for your final output.

Answer 3

If you want to keep the variables, You could try the following String formatting to space out the variable in the string evenly. In the example below the spacing is 20 characters between each value:
ForEach($service in services){
$startname = $service.startname
$state = $service.state
$servicename = $service.name
"{0,-20} | {1,-20} | {2,-20} | {3,-20}" -f $server,$servicename,$state,$startname `
| Out-File -append $ScriptDirectory
}

Answer 4

It's a little unclear what you're looking for as some of the properties of the object Get-Service returns don't exist as written and the code seems incomplete. Taking a guess at your intent though:
$servers = #("server1","server2");
$services = get-service -computername $servers;
$svcCollection = #();
ForEach($service in $services) {
$svccollection+=New-Object PSObject -Property #{
Servername = $service.MachineName;
StartName = $service.servicename;
State = $service.Status;
ServiceName = $service.DisplayName;
}
}
# Various output formats
$svccollection|ConvertTo-Html|Out-File -path Services.html; # Create a full HTML file
$svcCollection|Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation -Path Services.csv; # Create a "traditional" CSV file
$svcCollection|Export-Csv -Delimiter "`t" -Path Services-tab.csv; # Create a tab-delimited CSV file
$svcCollection|ConvertTo-Xml|Out-File -path Services.xml; # Create an XML file
$svcCollection|ConvertTo-Json|Out-File -path Services.js; # Create a JSON object (v3 only)