Powershell being too clever

Question

Apologies for what is probably a newbish question.

I am writing some Powershell scripts that run various queries against AD. They will usually return a bunch of results, which are easy to deal with, ie:

$results = myQuery
write-host "Returned " + $results.Count + " results."
foreach ($result in $results) { doSomething }

No worries. However, if there is only 1 result, Powershell automagically translates that result into a single object, rather than an array that contains 1 object. So the above code would break, both at the Count and the foreach. I'm sure the same problem would occur with 0 results.

Could someone suggest an elegant way to handle this? Perhaps some way to cast the results so they are always an array?

Answer 1

Change the first line of code to

$results = @(myQuery)

This will always return an array. See this blog entry for additional details.