PowerShell: Read hashtable from a file
Published:
Had a file with the following kind of data.
10.0.0.1=alice.example.com
10.0.0.2=bob.example.com
Wanted to read this in as a hashtable so that I could use it for lookup in a script. Tried doing the following, but ended up with an array of hashtables instead of one hashtable. This is because Get-Content by default actually gives you an array of lines, which are then piped into ConvertFrom-StringData one by one.
PS> Get-Content .\hostnames.txt | ConvertFrom-StringData
PS> $names.GetType()
IsPublic IsSerial Name BaseType
-------- -------- ---- --------
True True Object[] System.Array
PS> $names[0].GetType()
IsPublic IsSerial Name BaseType
-------- -------- ---- --------
True True Hashtable System.Object
Turns out it was easy to
fix by adding the -raw parameter.
PS> $names = Get-Content -raw .\hostnames.txt | ConvertFrom-StringData
PS> $names.GetType()
IsPublic IsSerial Name BaseType
-------- -------- ---- --------
True True Hashtable System.Object
PS> $names['10.0.0.1']
alice.example.com