INI file parsing in PowerShell

Question

Hello.

I'm parsing simple (no sections) INI file in PowerShell. Here code I've came up with, is there any way to simplify it?

convertfrom-stringdata -StringData ( `
  get-content .\deploy.ini `
  | foreach-object `
    -Begin { $total = "" }  `
    { $total += "`n" + $_.ToString() } `
    -End { $total } `
).Replace("\", "\\")

Answer 1

I'm not exactly sure what your source data looks like, or what your goal is. What exactly are you parsing for? Can you post a sample of the file? As-is, it looks like you're just concatenating carriage returns to the existing lines of the file and replacing \ with \.

Nor certain why you're using $.ToString() since $ is already a string object output by Get-Content.

Is the goal just to take a file containing a bunch of name=value pairs, and convert that to a hashtable? That's what ConvertFrom-StringData does, although that cmdlet is only available in the preview of PowerShell v2.

If your file looks like... key1=value1 key2=value2 key3=value3

Then all you should need is

ConvertFrom-StringData (Get-Content .\deploy.ini)

I'm not sure I understand why you're tacking on extra carriage returns. There's also no need to use the -Begin and -End parameters, at least not as far as I can see from what you've posted.

Answer 2

After searching internet on this topic I've found a handful of solutions. All of them are hand parsing of file data so I gave up trying to make standard cmdlets to do the job. There are fancy solutions as this witch support writing scenario.

There are simpler ones and as far as I need no writing support I've chose following very elegant code snippet:

Function Parse-IniFile ($file) {
  $ini = @{}
  switch -regex -file $file {
    "^\[(.+)\]$" {
      $section = $matches[1]
      $ini[$section] = @{}
    }
    "(.+)=(.+)" {
      $name,$value = $matches[1..2]
      $ini[$section][$name] = $value
    }
  }
  $ini
}

This one is Jacques Barathon's.