Powershell retrieving a variable from a text file

Question

Is there a way to read a text file C:\\test.txt and retrieve a particular value?

ie file looks like this:

serverName=serv8496
midasServer=serv8194


        

Answer 1

This is an improvement to the Shay Levy's answer. It does the following.

1. It ignores commented lines and new lines in the file.txt before start processing the file. So it resolves the error saying that name could not be created because it is an empty string.
2. It splits only on the first occurrence of the character "=". Therefore you can use any characters in the value field.
3. It performs Trim() operation in order to remove space characters from the beginning and end of the variable/property. Therefore "VARIABLE=VALUE" and "VARIABLE = VALUE" in the file.txt returns the same.
4. Set the scope of new variables to "Script". Variables created in the script scope are accessible only within the script file or module they are created in. Other options are Global, Local and Private. You can find a variable scope reference here.

Get-Content file.txt | Where-Object {$_.length -gt 0} | Where-Object {!$_.StartsWith("#")} | ForEach-Object {

    $var = $_.Split('=',2).Trim()
    New-Variable -Scope Script -Name $var[0] -Value $var[1]

}

Answer 2

If that is exactly how your file appears i.e. a list of key value pairs denoted with a equals sign then you should have a look at ConvertFrom-StringData which

converts a string that contains one or more key and value pairs into a hash table. Because each key/value pair must be on a separate line, here-strings are often used as the input format.

So if a text file contained just the data in your example you could do this to create a hashtable

$Path = "C:\temp\test.txt"
$values = Get-Content $Path | Out-String | ConvertFrom-StringData
$values.midasServer

Where the $values.midasServer would have the value serv8194. No need to know where the properties are in respect to the file. Your input file can also have varying leading and trailing space around the equals sign which will give the exact same result.

Depending on your use case you can take that one step farther and create a custom object from that hashtable

New-Object -TypeName pscustomobject -Property $values

If you have at least PowerShell v3 or higher you can simplify the process (assuming you want a custom psobject)

$values = [pscustomobject](Get-Content $Path -Raw | ConvertFrom-StringData)
$values.midasServer

Answer 3

Yes, read the file, split each line and assign the split result to the Name and Value parameters:

Get-Content file.txt | Foreach-Object{
   $var = $_.Split('=')
   New-Variable -Name $var[0] -Value $var[1]
}