PowerShell keep text formatting when reading in a file

Question

I believe this is a simple question, but I can\'t wrap my head around it. I want to do diagnostic commands in command shell on Windows. Like this:

   $cmd =          


        

Answer 1

This happens because of your casting. Get-Content returns an object array with a string object per line in the textfile. When you cast it to [string], it joins the objects in the array. The problem is that you don't specify what to join the objects with (e.g. linebreak (backtick)n).

ipconfig >> test.txt

#Get array of strings. One per line in textfile
$message = Get-Content test.txt

#Get one string-object with linebreaks
$message = (Get-Content test.txt) -join "`n"

Answer 2

Cast to an array of strings, maybe. Like this, for your last example:

$message = @(Get-Content c:\topsecret\testme.txt)

Or this for the second one:

$message = [string[]](ipconfig)

Answer 3

To read all the data as a single string with the line breaks embedded

$file = 'c:\testfiles\testfile.txt'

(IPconfig /all) > $file

[IO.File]::ReadAllText($file)

If you have V3, they added the -Raw parameter that will accomplish the same thing:

Get-Content $file -Raw