Accessing values of object properties in PowerShell

Question

I'm going through an array of objects and I can display the objects fine.

$obj

displays each object in my foreach loop fine. I'm trying to access the object fields and their values. This code also works fine:

$obj.psobject.properties

To just see the names of each object's fields, I do this:

$obj.psobject.properties | % {$_.name}

which also works fine.

When I try to access the values of those field by doing this:

$obj.psobject.properties | % {$obj.$_.name}

nothing is returned or displayed.

This is done for diagnostic purposes to see whether I can access the values of the fields. The main dilemma is that I cannot access a specific field's value. I.e.

$obj."some field"

does not return a value even though I have confirmed that "some field" has a value.

This has baffled me. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

Once you iterate over the properties inside the foreach, they become available via $_ (current object symbol). Just like you printed the names of the properties with $_.Name, using $_.Value will print their values:

$obj.psobject.properties | % {$_.Value}

Answer 2

Operator precedence interprets that in the following way:

($obj.$_).Name

which leads to nothing because you want

$obj.($_.Name)

which will first evaluate the name of a property and then access it on $obj.