Powershell ,Read from a txt file and Format Data( remove lines, remove blank spaces in between)

Question

I am really very new to powershell. I want to use powershell to read a txt file and change it to another format.

1. Read from a txt file.
2. Format Data( remove lines, remove blank spaces in between)
3. Count of records ( "T 000000002" 9 chars)

and then write the output to a new file.

I just started powershell two days ago so I don't know how to do this yet.

Answer 1

1. Reading from a file:

   Get-Content file.txt
   

2. Not quite sure what you want here. Get-Content returns an array of strings. You can then manipulate what you get and pass it on. The most helpful cmdlets here are probably Where-Object (for filtering) and ForEach-Object (for manipulating).

   For example, to remove all blank lines you can do

   Get-Content file.txt | Where-Object { $_ -ne '' } > file2.txt
   

   This can be shortened to

   Get-Content file.txt | Where-Object { $_ } > file2.txt
   

   since an empty string in a boolean context evaluates to false.

   Or to remove spaces in every line:

   Get-Content file.txt | ForEach-Object-Object { $_ -replace ' ' } > file2.txt
   

3. Again, not quite sure what you're after here. Possible things I could think of from your overly elaborate description are something along the lines of

   $_.Substring(2).Length
   

   or

   $_ -match '(\d+)' | Out-Null
   $Matches[1].Length