Technique for selectively formatting data in a PowerShell pipeline and output as HTML

Question

Say that you want to do some fancy formatting of some tabular output from powershell, and the destination is to be html (either for a webserver, or to be sent in an email). Let\

Answer 1

As a result of some github discussions, I've updated this for PowerShell 4/5/6 using the .where() method thus eliminating the dependency on the pipeline. The slow part is generating the HTML whereas the actual XML manipulation only takes ~200 ms.

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Xml.Linq

# Get the running processes to x(ht)ml. This is *SLOW*.
$xml = [System.Xml.Linq.XDocument]::Parse([string] (Get-Process | ConvertTo-Html))

# Find the index of the column you want to format:
$wsIndex = $xml.Descendants("{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}th").
    Where{$_.Value -eq "WS" }.
        NodesBeforeSelf().
            Count

# Format the column based on whatever rules you have:
switch($xml.Descendants("{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}td").Where{@($_.NodesBeforeSelf()).Count -eq $wsIndex} ) {
   {200MB -lt $_.Value } { $_.SetAttributeValue( "style", "background: red;"); continue } 
   {20MB  -lt $_.Value } { $_.SetAttributeValue( "style", "background: orange;"); continue } 
   {10MB  -lt $_.Value } { $_.SetAttributeValue( "style", "background: yellow;"); continue }
}

# Save the html out to a file
$xml.Save("$pwd/procs2.html")

# Open the thing in your browser to see what we've wrought
ii .\procs2.html