PowerShell: Store Entire Text File Contents in Variable

Question

On a side note, in PowerShell 3.0 you can use the Get-Content cmdlet with the new Raw switch:

$text = Get-Content .\file.txt -Raw 

To get the entire contents of a file:

$content = [IO.File]::ReadAllText(".\test.txt")

Number of lines:

([IO.File]::ReadAllLines(".\test.txt")).length

or

(gc .\test.ps1).length

Sort of hackish to include trailing empty line:

[io.file]::ReadAllText(".\desktop\git-python\test.ps1").split("`n").count

Powershell 2.0:

(see detailed explanation here)

$text = Get-Content $filePath | Out-String

The IO.File.ReadAllText didn't work for me with a relative path, it looks for the file in %USERPROFILE%\$filePath instead of the current directory (when running from Powershell ISE at least):

$text = [IO.File]::ReadAllText($filePath)

Powershell 3+:

$text = Get-Content $filePath -Raw

One more approach to reading a file that I happen to like is referred to variously as variable notation or variable syntax and involves simply enclosing a filespec within curly braces preceded by a dollar sign, to wit:

$content = ${C:file.txt}

This notation may be used as either an L-value or an R-value; thus, you could just as easily write to a file with something like this:

 ${D:\path\to\file.txt} = $content

Another handy use is that you can modify a file in place without a temporary file and without sub-expressions, for example:

${C:file.txt} = ${C:file.txt} | select -skip 1

I became fascinated by this notation initially because it was very difficult to find out anything about it! Even the PowerShell 2.0 specification mentions it only once showing just one line using it--but with no explanation or details of use at all. I have subsequently found this blog entry on PowerShell variables that gives some good insights.

One final note on using this: you must use a drive designation, i.e. ${drive:filespec} as I have done in all the examples above. Without the drive (e.g. ${file.txt}) it does not work. No restrictions on the filespec on that drive: it may be absolute or relative.

Get-Content grabs data and dumps it into an array, line by line. Assuming there aren't other special requirements than you listed, you could just save your content into a variable?

$file = Get-Content c:\file\whatever.txt

Running just $file will return the full contents. Then you can just do $file.Count (because arrays already have a count method built in) to get the total # of lines.

Hope this helps! I'm not a scripting wiz, but this seemed easier to me than a lot of the stuff above.