PowerShell Sum Array That Already Contains MBs

Question

I have an array that contains MBs already in the values. This is how MS DPM returns data written to a tape. I would like to sum them together. Is there an easy one liner to accommodate for this?

Answer 1

MB is a recognized numeric suffix in PowerShell's native grammar, so you can parse and evaluate your size strings with Invoke-Expression:

PS ~> Invoke-Expression '2401927.56MB'
2517924115906.56

You'll want to do some basic input validation to make sure it's actually a numeric sequence, and remove the thousand separator:

$Tapes.DataWrittenDisplayString |ForEach-Object {
    # remove commas and whitespace
    $dataWritten = $_ -replace '[,\s]'
    # ensure it's actually a number in the expected format
    if($dataWritten -match '^\d+(?:\.\d+)?[kmgtp]b$'){
        # let PowerShell do the rest
        $dataWritten |Invoke-Expression
    }
}