Preserve newlines when concatenating or using heredoc in PowerShell

Question

Suppose I have the a document c:\temp\temp.txt with contents

line 1
line 2

and I create the following function

PS>function wrapit($text) {
@"
---Start---
$text
---End---
"@
}

Then running PS> wrapit((Get-Content c:\temp\temp.txt))

will output

---Start---
line 1 line 2
---End---

How do I preserve newlines? Appending versus interpolating doesn't help.

I found this related question, but here they are using a string array. I am using a single string which has newline characters in it (you can see them if you output the string directly from inside the function without concatenating and $text | gm confirms I'm working with a string, not an array). I can do all the string parsing in the world to hammer it into place, but that seems like I'd be banging a square peg in a round hole. What is the concept that I'm missing?

Answer 1

A simple way to do what you want is:

wrapit((Get-Content c:\temp\temp.txt | out-string))

Now the explanation: Here-strings @"" just behave like strings "" and the result is due to the PowerShell behaviour in variables expansion. Just try:

$a = Get-Content c:\temp\temp.txt
"$a"

---

Regarding your comment:

$a | Get-Member
TypeName: System.String
...

But

Get-Member -InputObject $a
TypeName: System.Object[]
...

The first answer is OK (it receives strings). It just does not repeat System.string each time. In the second it receive an array as parameter.

Answer 2

Son of a...

Upon investigation it seems that Get-Content returns a string array. Which is of course coerced to a string by default by joining on the default character ' '.

What is really puzzling is why the results are coerced by get-member to a string. Anyone know why that would happen? The issue wasn't obvious until I explicitly checked Get-Type

In any case, the solution was to read the file using [system.io.file]::ReadAllText('c:\temp\temp.txt') over Get-Content