Help creating CSV from long txt

Question

Hi everyone,

I need to get the information on a txt file to a csv.

The txt file has the data as:

Add-ADSyncAttributeFlowMapping  `  
-SynchronizationRule $syncRule[0] `  
-Destination 'deviceOSType' `  
-FlowType 'Expression' `  
-ValueMergeType 'Update' `  
-Expression 'IIF(InStr([operatingSystem],"Windows") > 0,"Windows",[operatingSystem])' `  
-OutVariable syncRule  
  
  
Add-ADSyncAttributeFlowMapping  `  
-SynchronizationRule $syncRule[0] `  
-Source @('ServerAd') `  
-Destination 'deviceTrustType' `  
-FlowType 'Constant' `  
-ValueMergeType 'Update' `  
-OutVariable syncRule  

as you can see, there are 2 kinds of info being sync. One with source and destination and the other one has destination and expression.
TXT file has a lot of those parraphs.

What i need is to get that info and convert it to a csv to look something like

is there any possible way to do this?

Answer 1

Hi there,

You can use the Export-Csv cmdlet to convert objects to CSV strings. Export-CSV is similar to ConvertTo-CSV , except that it saves the CSV strings to a file. The ConvertTo-CSV cmdlet has parameters to specify a delimiter other than a comma or use the current culture as the delimiter.

A tab-separated text file could be treated as a CSV file with a tab instead of a comma as its delimiter. To convert:

import-csv tabdelimitedfile.txt -delimiter "`t" | export-csv csvfile.csv

This might help you in digging out more info https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/convertto-csv?view=powershell-7.2

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Answer 2

This is a somewhat naive parser for the data provided:

$InFile = "c:\junk\parse.txt"

$rule = [ordered]@{}
$incmdlet = $false
$lines = Get-Content $InFile
ForEach ($ln in $lines){
    if ($ln.Trim().Length -eq 0){
        if ($incmdlet){
            [PSCustomObject]$rule
        }
        $rule = [ordered]@{}
        $incmdlet = $false
        continue
    }
    if ($ln -like "Add-ADSyncAttributeFlowMapping*"){
        $incmdlet = $true
        continue
    }
    if ($incmdlet -and $ln.substring(0,1) -eq '-'){ # a parameter and value or a switch with a value
        if ($ln -match "^-(\w+?)\s+:?([^``]+)") {
            $rule[$matches[1]] = $matches[2].Trim().Trim("'")
        }
        elseif ($ln -match "^-(\w+?)\s+``?)") {     # a switch with no value
            $rule[$matches[1]] = ""
        }
    }
}

Note: in its present form, the code depends on an empty line at the end of the file to produce the PSCustomObject. Also, if there are parameter names that are not present in all the cmdlets you may have to provide a "-Header" parameter to any Export-CSV because the objects don't contain a uniform set of parameter names.