Handling ini files in PowerShell

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 15:03:08 +0000

This morning Aaron Parker was wondering if Hash Tables could be used to work with ini files:

I thought it was a great idea because in Hash Tables you can use the . operator to get or set a Hash Table entry. But I wondered what to do with sections in ini files. Then I got the idea to use nested Hash Tables for that.

The result is two functions, one to read an ini file into a nested Hash Table and one function to write it back to an ini file.

Sorting a hashtable by byte value in PowerShell

Tue, 22 Jul 2014 12:03:28 +0000

In a PowerShell script I needed to sort a hash table by byte value (not alphabetically, lowercase parameters will be listed after uppercase ones). An example for this requirement is the Amazon Product Advertising API.

Consider the following hashtable as an example:

Example Hash Table powershell Download

$params = @{}
$params.Add("AssociateTag", "dummy")
$params.Add("AWSAccessKeyId", "AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE")
$params.Add("IdType", "0679722769")
$params.Add("Operation", "ItemLookup")

If we use the Sort-Object to order the list (note that we need to use the GetEnumerator method):

Sort Hash Table powershell Download

$params.GetEnumerator() | Sort-Object Name

We will get the following result:

Sort Results powershell Download

Name Value
---- -----
AssociateTag dummy
AWSAccessKeyId AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
IdType 0679722769
Operation ItemLookup

If you use the -CaseSensitive switch the resulting order will remain the same.

HashTable on Remko's Blog

Handling ini files in PowerShell

Sorting a hashtable by byte value in PowerShell