Technique for selectively formatting data in a PowerShell pipeline and output as HTML

Question

Say that you want to do some fancy formatting of some tabular output from powershell, and the destination is to be html (either for a webserver, or to be sent in an email). Let\

Answer 1

A much faster way:

Ok, I keep promising myself that I won't spend time on solved problems anymore, but ... that switch statement in my second answer was taking over 10 seconds to run on my system, -- because it's doing the "where" stuff in PowerShell instead of in LINQ.

Since PowerShell doesn't support LINQ, I solved it by writing a static helper method in an Add-Type call (and sped up that switch statement by about 1000x):

Add-Type -Language CSharpVersion3 -ReferencedAssemblies System.Xml, System.Xml.Linq -UsingNamespace System.Linq -Name XUtilities -Namespace Huddled -MemberDefinition @"    
    public static System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable GetElementByIndex( System.Xml.Linq.XContainer doc, System.Xml.Linq.XName element, int index) {
        return from e in doc.Descendants(element) where e.NodesBeforeSelf().Count() == index select e;
    }
    public static System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable GetElementByValue( System.Xml.Linq.XContainer doc, System.Xml.Linq.XName element, string value) {
        return from e in doc.Descendants(element) where e.Value == value select e;
    }
"@

# Get the running processes to x(ht)ml
$xml = [System.Xml.Linq.XDocument]::Parse( "$(Get-Process | ConvertTo-Html)" )

# Find the index of the column you want to format:
$wsIndex = [Huddled.XUtilities]::GetElementByValue( $xml, "{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}th", "WS" ) | %{ ($_.NodesBeforeSelf() | Measure).Count }


switch([Huddled.XUtilities]::GetElementByIndex( $xml, "{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}td", $wsIndex )) {
   {200MB -lt $_.Value } { $_.SetAttributeValue( "style", "background: red;"); continue } 
   {20MB  -lt $_.Value } { $_.SetAttributeValue( "style", "background: orange;"); continue } 
   {10MB  -lt $_.Value } { $_.SetAttributeValue( "style", "background: yellow;"); continue } 
}

# Save the html out to a file
$xml.Save("$pwd/procs2.html")

# Open the thing in your browser to see what we've wrought
ii .\procs2.html

PowerShell 3:

I redid this in PowerShell 3 after someone linked to this post, and you no longer need the compiled types to get it fast:

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Xml.Linq

$Process = $(Get-Process | Select Handles, NPM, PM, WS, VM, CPU, Id, ProcessName)

$xml = [System.Xml.Linq.XDocument]::Parse( "$($Process | ConvertTo-Html)" )
if($Namespace = $xml.Root.Attribute("xmlns").Value) {
    $Namespace = "{{{0}}}" -f $Namespace
}

# Find the index of the column you want to format:
$wsIndex = [Array]::IndexOf( $xml.Descendants("${Namespace}th").Value, "WS")

foreach($row in $xml.Descendants("${Namespace}tr")){
    switch(@($row.Descendants("${Namespace}td"))[$wsIndex]) {
       {200MB -lt $_.Value } { $_.SetAttributeValue( "style", "background: red;"); continue } 
       {20MB  -lt $_.Value } { $_.SetAttributeValue( "style", "background: orange;"); continue } 
       {10MB  -lt $_.Value } { $_.SetAttributeValue( "style", "background: yellow;"); continue } 
    }
}
# Save the html out to a file
$xml.Save("$pwd/procs1.html")

# Open the thing in your browser to see what we've wrought
ii .\procs2.html