Split text by columns in PowerShell

Question

I\'m a PowerShell novice (Bash is my thing normally) who\'s currently trying to obtain qwinsta output to show who is logged in as an \'rdpwd\' (rdesktop) user so that I can

Answer 1

I like Matt's answer for this, however it has issues with spaces in column headings (they are problematic in general, but sometimes you can't do much). Here's a tweaked, functionized version to help. Note you could probably tweak the preproc to include e.g. tabs or other delimiters but still relies on per-line indexes being constant.

function Convert-TextColumnsToObject([String]$data)
{
    $splitLinesOn=[Environment]::NewLine
    $columnPreproc="\s{2,}"
    $headerString = $data.Split($splitLinesOn) | select -f 1
    #Preprocess to handle headings with spaces
    $headerElements = ($headerString -replace "$columnPreproc", "|") -split "\|" | Where-Object{$_}
    $headerIndexes = $headerElements | ForEach-Object{$headerString.IndexOf($_)}
    $results = $data.Split($splitLinesOn) | Select-Object -Skip 1  | ForEach-Object{
        $props = @{}
        $line = $_
        For($indexStep = 0; $indexStep -le $headerIndexes.Count - 1; $indexStep++){
            $value = $null            # Assume a null value 
            $valueLength = $headerIndexes[$indexStep + 1] - $headerIndexes[$indexStep]
            $valueStart = $headerIndexes[$indexStep]
            If(($valueLength -gt 0) -and (($valueStart + $valueLength) -lt $line.Length)){
                $value = ($line.Substring($valueStart,$valueLength)).Trim()
            } ElseIf ($valueStart -lt $line.Length){
                $value = ($line.Substring($valueStart)).Trim()
            }
            $props.($headerElements[$indexStep]) = $value    
        }
        [pscustomobject]$props
    }

    return $results
} 

Example:

$data= @"
    DRIVER              VOLUME NAME
    local               004e9c5f2ecf96345297965d3f98e24f7a6a69f5c848096e81f3d5ba4cb60f1e
    local               081211bd5d09c23f8ed60fe63386291a0cf452261b8be86fc154b431280c0c11
    local               112be82400a10456da2e721a07389f21b4e88744f64d9a1bd8ff2379f54a0d28
    "@ 

$obj=Convert-TextColumnsToObject $data
$obj | ?{ $_."VOLUME NAME" -match "112be" }