How to filter rows in the powershell which are taken from console program?

Question

I have an .exe console program which put the result into the console in the following format:

 ------------------ ----------- ----------------
  CompanyName        CompanyId   CompanyType
 ------------------ ----------- ----------------
  test1              1           Root
  test2              2           Center
  test3              3           Company
 ------------------ ----------- ----------------

I would like to pick up this in a PowerShell script and filter by the CompanyName.

I tried it with:

MyTool.exe companies | where {$_.CompanyName -eq 'test1'}

but it seems that this doesn't work.

Answer 1

Here is one way to convert the output of an EXE to a powershell collection of objects. what it does ...

• creates a fake version of the output of your exe file
• filters out the lines with repeated hyphens
• replaces leading spaces with nothing
• replaces 2-or-more spaces with a comma
• converts that CSV-like string array into a collection of powershell objects

here's the code [grin] ...

# fake getting string output from an EXE
$InStuff = @'
 ------------------ ----------- ----------------
  CompanyName        CompanyId   CompanyType
 ------------------ ----------- ----------------
  test1              1           Root
  test2              2           Center
  test3              3           Company
 ------------------ ----------- ----------------
'@ -split [environment]::NewLine

$CompanyInfo = $InStuff -notmatch '--{2,}' -replace '^ {1,}' -replace ' {2,}', ',' |
    ConvertFrom-Csv

$CompanyInfo
'=' * 30
$CompanyInfo -match 'Test1'

output ...

CompanyName CompanyId CompanyType
----------- --------- -----------
test1       1         Root       
test2       2         Center     
test3       3         Company    
==============================
test1       1         Root