PSCustomObject returns with extra return(s)

Question

Using the documentation Everything you wanted to know about PSCustomObject

$myObject = [PSCustomObject]@{
    Name     = 'Kevin'
    Language = 'PowerShell'
    State    = 'Texas'
}

$myObject

Above results with

Name  Language   State
----  --------   -----
Kevin PowerShell Texas

Note the last line is a empty or a blank return. Is there a means to remove that?

If I convert the object to a string with

$myObject | Out-String).TrimEnd("`r`n").Trim()

The returns leave but I think there must be a means to do this without changing to a string ?

Answer 1

The empty line at the end is just the default Table format. Any object be it psobject or not, that is displayed as a table will have that empty line at the end. If you want a workaround for that Out-String with the .TrimEnd, probably the easiest way can be with oss (or Out-String -Stream) and then you can Select-Object -SkipLast 1 to get rid of the last empty line.

$myObject | oss | Select-Object -SkipLast 1

If you wanna skip also the first line, in PowerShell 7 you can combine -Skip with -SkipLast, in PowerShell 5.1 you will need to pipe into -Skip first and then pipe again into -SkipLast:

# pwsh 7, this is OK:
Select-Object -Skip 1 -SkipLast 1

# pwsh 5.1, requires:
Select-Object -Skip 1 | Select-Object -SkipLast 1

If you wanna create a new function just like oss but that skips this last line by default you can create another steppable pipeline from Out-String that defaults to -Stream (just like oss) but also skips the last item:

function oss2 {
    [CmdletBinding(HelpUri = 'https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=2097024')]
    param(
        [ValidateRange(2, 2147483647)]
        [int] ${Width},

        [Parameter(ValueFromPipeline = $true)]
        [psobject] ${InputObject})

    begin {
        $sb = {
            Microsoft.PowerShell.Utility\Out-String @PSBoundParameters -Stream |
                Select-Object -SkipLast 1
        }

        $pipe = $sb.GetSteppablePipeline($MyInvocation.CommandOrigin)
        $pipe.Begin($PSCmdlet)
    }

    process {
        $pipe.Process($InputObject)
    }

    end {
        $pipe.End()
    }
}