csv reformatting with powershell - powershell

Question

I have a file cointaining a lot of lines in this format:
firstname ; lastname ; age ;
(it's a bit more complex but that's basically the file)
so the fields are of a fixed length, padded with spaces and with a semicolon in between the fields.
I would like to have it so:
firstname, lastname, age,
(commas and no fixed width)
I have replaced the commas with regexp but I would like to also trim the end of the strings. But I don't know how to do this.
The following is my start, but I can't manage to get a ".TrimEnd()" in there. I have also thought of trying a "-replace(" ", " ") but I can't integrate it in this expression:
Get-Content .\Bestand.txt | %{$data= [regex]::split($_, ';'); [string]:: join(',', $data)}
Can I get some information on how to achieve this?

Answer 1

I suggest you replace each occurrence of 'space;space' with a comma (assuming the replaced characters do not appear within a valid value), so the end result will look like:
firstname,lastname,age
Keeping it like the following is not a good idea cause now some of your headers (property names) start with a space:
"firstname, lastname, age,"
Give this a try (work on a copy of the file):
(Get-Content .\Bestand.txt) |
foreach {$_ -replace ' ; ',','} |
out-file .\Bestand.txt
Now it's easy to import and process the file with Import-Csv cmdlet.

Answer 2

The -replace operator takes a regular expression, which you can use to remove all leading and trailing spaces:
Get-Content .\Bestand.txt |
Foreach-Object { $_ -replace ' *; *',',' } |
Out-File .\Bestand.csv -Encoding OEM

Answer 3

Since you already create something CSV-ish, I'd go all the way and create proper CSV:
$cols = "firstname","lastname","age","rest"
Import-Csv "C:\input.txt" -Delimiter ";" -Header $cols | % {
foreach ($property in $_.PsObject.Properties) {
$property.Value = ([string]$property.Value).Trim()
}
$_
} | Export-Csv "C:\output.csv" -NoTypeInformation