Capturing command output in Powershell as string instead of array of strings

Question

I am trying to capture the output of running an external command as a string, but the result returned by Powershell is always an array of strings. It is my understanding that Powershell splits the output on newlines (Windows or Unix line endings) and stores the result in an array, but I would like these newlines to be preserved since this is for an svn pre-commit hook script to detect if a committed file has mixed line endings.

$output = svnlook cat -t $transId -r $repos $filename

At this point line endings have been stripped, and $output is an array of strings, one per line of output.

Redirecting to a file does not seem to work since this normalizes the line endings. How do you tell Powershell to not split a command's output?

Thanks!

Ansgar Wiechers · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-09 20:52:34Z

20

Pipe the command output into the Out-String cmdlet:

$output = svnlook cat -t $transId -r $repos $filename | Out-String

answered Jan 9, 2014 at 20:52

Ansgar Wiechers

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Ansgar Wiechers · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-12 00:58:24Z

10

Just wrap the "inner" command in parentheses, and use the -join operator with "`n" on the right.

# Preserve line breaks
$result = (ipconfig) -join "`n";

# Remove line breaks
$result = (ipconfig) -join '';

edited Jan 12, 2014 at 0:58

Ansgar Wiechers

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answered Jan 9, 2014 at 18:27

user189198

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mjolinor · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-09 18:40:09Z

5

If you need it as a single string, you can just cast the result to [string]

[string]$output = svnlook cat -t $transId -r $repos $filename

answered Jan 9, 2014 at 18:40

mjolinor

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1 Comment

Willem M. Over a year ago

Note that tis concatenates the lines without putting newlines in, as opposed to the out-string solution.

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