To write to a log file in PowerShell, use Add-Content with a timestamp from Get-Date. Add-Content creates the file the first time and appends a new line on every call after that: Output: Below I turn this into a reusable Write-Log function, add daily log files and error logging, and show one file-name mistake that … Read more
To get a substring in PowerShell, call the Substring method on a string. Substring(start, length) returns length characters from the start position, and Substring(start) returns everything from there to the end: Output: Positions start at 0, so position 3 is the fourth character. I ran every example here in PowerShell 7.6 and Windows PowerShell 5.1, … Read more
The PowerShell -like operator compares text against a wildcard pattern and returns True or False. * matches any characters and ? matches exactly one: It ignores case unless you use -clike, and the pattern must cover the whole string. I tested every example in PowerShell 7 and Windows PowerShell 5.1, including one file filter that … Read more
To check if a string starts with a number in PowerShell, use -match with the pattern ^\d. The caret anchors the match to the start, and \d is any digit: For strict 0 to 9 only, use ^[0-9] instead, because \d accepts digits from other alphabets too. I tested every example in PowerShell 7 and … Read more
To run a PowerShell script in Visual Studio Code, install Microsoft’s PowerShell extension, open your .ps1 file and press F5. To run only a few lines, select them and press F8. You can also type the script path in the terminal: Below I set up the extension, run a script with and without parameters, debug … Read more
To run a PowerShell script in PowerShell ISE, open the .ps1 file with File > Open (Ctrl+O) and press F5, or click the green Run Script button. To run only part of the script, select those lines and press F8. The output shows in the console pane under the script. The ISE runs Windows PowerShell … Read more
To convert Excel to CSV with PowerShell, open the workbook through Excel’s COM object and save it with file format 6 (xlCSV). On a machine without Excel, the ImportExcel module does the same job in one line: The two routes don’t produce the same file, though. Below I convert a real two-sheet workbook both ways … Read more
Rebooting into F10 setup to check one BIOS option gets old fast. HP business PCs expose those options to Windows, so we can read them from a PowerShell window instead. Quick answer: to get HP BIOS settings using PowerShell, run Get-CimInstance against the HP_BIOSEnumeration class in the root\HP\InstrumentedBIOS namespace from an elevated session. Each setting … Read more
To convert HTML to plain text in PowerShell, strip the tags with -replace and then decode entities like & with WebUtility.HtmlDecode. For a short snippet, this one line does both: Full pages and email bodies need a bit more care, though. Scripts, styles and line breaks get in the way, and Windows PowerShell 5.1 and … Read more
To convert XML to a table in PowerShell, cast the file to [xml], walk down to the repeating element with dot notation, and pipe those nodes to Format-Table. Each child element and attribute becomes a column: That covers flat files. Real XML has attributes, nested nodes and namespaces, so I’ll also show how to pick … Read more