How to get leading spaces instead of zeros in Powershell?

Question

Somewhere in my script I'm writing a folderstructure to Host with the number of files in each folder [1]:

$FolderName = "BAR"
$ItemCount  = "{0:000}" -f 7

Write-Host $ItemCount $FolderName

which would output something like [2]:

007 BAR
044 BAZ
311 FOO

What I actually want is [3]:

  7 BAR
 44 BAZ
311 FOO

I don't want to use a custom Powershell object because it would output over the full width of the console [4]:

Folder                                                       Itemcount
------                                                       ---------
BAR                                                                  7
BAZ                                                                 44
FOO                                                                311

I would like an output like [5]:

Folder   ItemCount
------   ---------
BAR              7
BAZ             44
FOO            311

So close together which makes it much more readable. But I chose my solution (ItemCount in from of FolderName) as a second best option because I could not get this to work.

How can I get an output like in [3] or [5]?

Answer 1

So a couple of ways to go about this. Depends on what you are doing with the end result. Uses the alignment option of the -Format parameter (5 places)

gci c:\temp *.csv | ForEach-Object{
    "{0,5} {1}" -f $_.Length, $_.Name
}

Or maybe the string method .PadLeft(). Both examples that following should produce the same output. Readability could be impacted in the first. Note that .PadLeft() is a string method. In my examples I am using length which is int so we have to cast to string.

"$(([string]($_.Length)).PadLeft(5)) $($_.Name)"
"{0} {1}" -f ([string]($_.Length)).PadLeft(5),$_.Name

Now... perhaps you just was to work with Format-Table for nice on screen output. Just need to use my first example in another way

gci c:\temp *.csv | Select-Object @{Name="Length";Expression={"{0,5}" -f $_.Length}}, Name | Format-Table -AutoSize

Answer 2

$ItemCount=($Count.ToString()).PadLeft(3)