Powershell hashtable does not write to file as expected - receive only "System.Collections" rows

Question

Can someone please explain Why my first examples don't work, and why adding in a ForEach-Object solves the problem? Thanks in advance!

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I parsed the return from a command into a hashtable (sample at end of post) and want to log the information to a file as part of my processing. I know that $ht.GetEnumerator() | Sort-Object Name will return the full hash to screen, sorted. However, once I try sending things to file, it breaks.

$ht | Add-Content log.txt

only logs a single row of System.Collections.Hashtable. So, I've also tried

$ht.GetEnumerator() | Sort-Object Name | Add-Content log.txt 

and end up with rows of

System.Collections.DictionaryEntry
System.Collections.DictionaryEntry
System.Collections.DictionaryEntry

So then I tried to loop through and handle each individually with

foreach ($key in $ht.keys) {
Add-Content log.txt "$key : $ht.$key" }

and end up with

Server address : System.Collections.Hashtable.Server address
Client address : System.Collections.Hashtable.Client address
User name : System.Collections.Hashtable.User name

Solved with:

$ht.GetEnumerator() | Sort-Object Name |
ForEach-Object {"{0} : {1}" -f $_.Name,$_.Value} |
Add-Content log.txt 

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For reference, the hashtable sample:

$ht = @{
    "Server address" = "server.net";
    "Client address" = "10.20.121.153";
    "User name" = "myuser"
}

Answer 1

I agree with mjolinor... just not enough points to vote up... plus i'll add that you dont need the GetEnumerator

$ht | out-string | add-content log.txt

will do it.

Answer 2

As you can see in Microsoft documentation a hash table is simply a collection of name-value pairs.

So $ht is really System.Collections.Hashtable composed of System.Collections.DictionaryEntry.

A good way to use it is

foreach ($i in $ht.keys)
{
  add-content log.txt ("{0} {1}" -f $i, $ht[$i])
}