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I've got a huge XML file (0.5 GB), with no line breaks. I want to be able to look at, say, the first 200 characters without opening the whole file. Is there a way to do this with PowerShell?
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When you need to search through a string or log files in Linux we can use the grep command. For PowerShell, we can use the grep equivalent Select-String . We can get pretty much the same results with this powerful cmdlet. Select-String uses just like grep regular expression to find text patterns in files and strings.
New line (`n)The new line ( `n ) character inserts a line break immediately after the character. This example shows how to use the new line character to create line breaks in a Write-Host command.
PowerShell Get First Character of StringUse the Substring method over the given string and pass the start index as 0 to the start point of the character and length as 1 to get a number of characters to return. The output of the above script gets the first character of a string.
When you want to read the entire contents of a text file, the easiest way is to use the built-in Get-Content function. When you execute this command, the contents of this file will be displayed in your command prompt or the PowerShell ISE screen, depending on where you execute it.
You can read at the byte level with Get-Content like so:
$bytes = Get-Content .\files.txt -Encoding byte -TotalCount 200
[System.Text.Encoding]::Unicode.GetString($bytes)
If the log file is ASCII you can simplify this to:
[char[]](Get-Content .\files.txt -Encoding byte -TotalCount 200)
PowerShell Core doesn't support byte encoding. It's been replaced by -AsByteStream parameter.
$bytes = Get-Content .\file.txt -AsByteStream -TotalCount 200
[System.Text.Encoding]::Unicode.GetString($bytes)
Copying binary files via powershell commandlets tend to be a bit slow. You may, however, run the following commands from powershell to get a decent performance:
cmd /c copy /b "large file.ext" "first n.ext"
FSUTIL file seteof "first n.ext" $nbytes
Tested in Win 10 PS 5.1
Result: 1.43GB processed in 4 seconds
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