Newlines in foreach array string - Powershell

Question

Why do I get newlines in the following:

[string[]]$lines= "001 AALTON, Alan .....25 Every Street","002 BROWN, James .... 101 Browns Road","008 FLANAGAN, Lesley .... 1 Lovers Lane"

foreach ($line in $lines) {
    $line
}

Output:

001 AALTON, Alan .....25 Every Street
002 BROWN, James .... 101 Browns Road
008 FLANAGAN, Lesley .... 1 Lovers Lane

The foreach docs make no mention of newlines. My loop does not contain newline instruction. And it's obviously not in the source data?

Any explanation would be appreciated.

mklement0 · Accepted Answer · 2022-07-22 21:03:13Z

2

The newlines are a formatting artifact, they're not part of your array elements: PowerShell's output formatting system renders each element of a collection of strings / primitive types on its own line, and the same applies to outputting instances of such types one by one to the success output stream, which is what your foreach statement does.

To give a simple example: 'foo', 'bar', 'foo'; 'bar' and foreach ($s in 'foo', 'bar') { $s } all result in the same output:

foo
bar

If you need a different representation, create a string in the desired format yourself; e.g.:

PS> $lines -join ', '

001 AALTON, Alan .....25 Every Street, 002 BROWN, James .... 101 Browns Road, 008 FLANAGAN, Lesley .... 1 Lovers Lane

answered Jul 22, 2022 at 21:03

mklement0

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1 Comment

Dave Over a year ago

I realize that this thread is a little hypothetical. But if I add the following to my $line output. $line | Out-File lines.txt -Append I get newlines. And it seems interesting to me that this is by default. That is; I need to specify the parameter -NoNewline Which I would have thought would be the default (if I followed your logic of newlines being a formatting artifact)

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