PowerShell Store Entire Text File Contents in Variable

Question

I d like to use PowerShell to store the entire contents of a text file  including the trailing blank line that may or may not exist  in a variable  I d also like to know the total number of lines in the text file  What s the most efficient way to do this

User · Answer

Get-Content grabs data and dumps it into an array, line by line. Assuming there aren't other special requirements than you listed, you could just save your content into a variable?

$file = Get-Content c:\file\whatever.txt

Running just $file will return the full contents. Then you can just do $file.Count (because arrays already have a count method built in) to get the total # of lines.

Hope this helps! I'm not a scripting wiz, but this seemed easier to me than a lot of the stuff above.

User · Answer

On a side note  in PowerShell 3 0 you can use the Get-Content cmdlet with the new Raw switch    text   Get-Content   file txt -Raw

User · Answer

One more approach to reading a file that I happen to like is referred to variously as variable notation or variable syntax and involves simply enclosing a filespec within curly braces preceded by a dollar sign  to wit    content     C file txt    This notation may be used as either an L-value or an R-value  thus  you could just as easily write to a file with something like this      D  path to file txt     content   Another handy use is that you can modify a file in place without a temporary file and without sub-expressions  for example     C file txt      C file txt    select -skip 1   I became fascinated by this notation initially because it was very difficult to find out anything about it  Even the PowerShell 2 0 specification mentions it only once showing just one line using it--but with no explanation or details of use at all  I have subsequently found this blog entry on PowerShell variables that gives some good insights   One final note on using this  you must use a drive designation  i e    drive filespec  as I have done in all the examples above  Without the drive  e g    file txt   it does not work  No restrictions on the filespec on that drive  it may be absolute or relative

User · Answer

To get the entire contents of a file    content    IO File   ReadAllText    test txt     Number of lines     IO File   ReadAllLines    test txt    length   or   gc   test ps1  length   Sort of hackish to include trailing empty line    io file   ReadAllText    desktop git-python test ps1   split   n   count

User · Answer

Powershell 2 0    see detailed explanation here    text   Get-Content  filePath   Out-String   The IO File ReadAllText didn t work for me with a relative path  it looks for the file in  USERPROFILE   filePath instead of the current directory  when running from Powershell ISE at least     text    IO File   ReadAllText  filePath    Powershell 3     text   Get-Content  filePath -Raw

[powershell] PowerShell: Store Entire Text File Contents in Variable

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