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...

ico         


        

Answer 1

here's another way to do the job with a combo of simple regex patterns and string operators.

$InStuff = @'
column1:value1
column2:value2
column3:value3
column4:value4
column5:value5

column1:value6
column2:value7
column3:value8 
column4:value9
column5:value10

column1:value11 
column2:value12
column3:value13 
column4:value14
column5:value15
'@


$SplitInStuff = $InStuff -split ([environment]::NewLine * 2)

$HeaderLine = ($SplitInStuff[0] -replace '(?m):.+$').Split([environment]::NewLine) -join ', '

$CSV_Text = [System.Collections.Generic.List[string]]::new()
$CSV_Text.Add($HeaderLine)

foreach ($SIS_Item in $SplitInStuff)
    {
    $CSV_Text.Add(($SIS_Item  -replace '(?m)^.+:').Split([environment]::NewLine).Where({$_}) -join ', ')
    }

$Results = $CSV_Text |
    ConvertFrom-Csv

# on screen
$Results |
    Format-Table

# to CSV
$Results |
    Export-Csv -LiteralPath "$env:TEMP\JohnnyCarino_ReformatedData.csv" -NoTypeInformation

output ...

column1  column2 column3  column4 column5
-------  ------- -------  ------- -------
value1   value2  value3   value4  value5 
value6   value7  value8   value9  value10
value11  value12 value13  value14 value15

CSV file content ...

"column1","column2","column3","column4","column5"
"value1","value2","value3","value4","value5"
"value6","value7","value8 ","value9","value10"
"value11 ","value12","value13 ","value14","value15"