PowerShell: programmatically access script documentation

Question

Is there a way to programmatically load the documentation of a .ps1 script file outside of commands like get-help? In other words, can text defined under .SYNOPSIS, .DESCRIPTION, etc. be accessed programmatically other than filtering the string output of get-help itself?

Among other things, I'm trying to find where I have gaps in documentation coverage in my script library. I'd also like to be able to display lists of certain scripts with their synopsis attached.

Answer 1

Yes, those are all accessible. Get-Help returns (just like any other cmdlet) an object, and the default rendering of that object is what you see in the console.

However, if you pump get-help's output through format-list, like this:

get-help get-childitem | format-list

You'll get a list of name-value pairs of the properties. To get the synopsis, you can do the following:

get-help get-childitem |select-object -property synopsis

And the output:

Synopsis
--------
Gets the files and folders in a file system drive.

If your .ps1 file has no cmdlets defined in it (your comment-based help covers the whole script), get-help file.ps1|select synopsis should work. Otherwise, you'll need to "dot-source" the files to load the cmdlet definitions into memory, then use get-help as above.