Quickest way to organize categorized data in a text file and convert to CSV

Question

I have a text file with hundreds of rows. Data fields and values separated by a colon and one empty line separating each data set. It looks something like this...

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Answer 1

The simplest approach would be to split your data at 2 consecutive newlines and convert the data chunks into hashtables via ConvertFrom-StringData (you must also replace : with = for that to work). The hashtables can then be converted to custom objects and exported to a CSV.

$data = Get-Content 'C:\path\to\input.txt' -Raw

$data -replace ':', '=' -split '\r?\n\r?\n' | ForEach-Object {
    [PSCustomObject]($_ | ConvertFrom-StringData)
} | Export-Csv 'C:\path\to\output.csv' -NoType

Note that the above requires PowerShell v3 or newer. For older PowerShell versions you need to adjust the code as below:

$data = Get-Content 'C:\path\to\input.txt' | Out-String

$data -replace ':', '=' -split '\r?\n\r?\n' | ForEach-Object {
    $prop = $_ | ConvertFrom-StringData
    New-Object -Type PSObject -Property $prop
} | Export-Csv 'C:\path\to\output.csv' -NoType

If you want the fields of the CSV in a particular order you can put a Select-Object between the ForEach-Object and Export-Csv:

... | ForEach-Object {
    ...
} | Select-Object icon, temperatureHigh, ... | Export-Csv ...

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Import-Csv expects the input data organized as one dataset per row. It cannot be used for blocks of key:value pairs like your input data has.

ConvertTo-Csv requires the same preparation as Export-Csv in the sample code above. The only difference is that the output isn't written to a file.