Another Reason I like PowerShell

I enjoyed reading Rob Conery’s post The Reasons I Like Ruby. He has a nice example where he wants to import a list of countries from an online file.

Version that follows the Ruby one

$url = "http://openconcept.ca/sites/openconcept.ca/files/country_code_drupal_0.txt"            
            
$wc = New-Object Net.WebClient            
            
($wc.DownloadString($url)).Split("`r`n") |             
    ForEach {            
        $countryCode, $countryName = $_.Split('|')            
        New-Object PSObject -Property @{            
            CountryCode = $countryCode            
            CountryName = $countryName            
        }            
    }

Shorter version using PowerShell’s ConvertFrom-Csv

$url = "http://openconcept.ca/sites/openconcept.ca/files/country_code_drupal_0.txt"            
            
$wc = New-Object Net.WebClient            
            
$wc.DownloadString($url) |             
    ConvertFrom-Csv -Delimiter "|" -Header CountryCode, CountryName

Results

• This is all out of the box PowerShell
• Note the New-Object Net.WebClient. Tapping into the .NET framework
• Notice the 5th line of the first version, the one with the .Split(‘|’), showing off PowerShell’s ability to assign variables in succession

Both versions return an array of objects (.NET objects), each object has two properties. CountryCode, CountryName

# Results            
CountryName CountryCode
----------- -----------                                 
AF          Afghanistan
AL          Albania
DZ          Algeria
AS          American Samoa
AD          Andorra
AO          Angola
AI          Anguilla
AQ          Antarctica

It’s safe to say that with C# and System.Net it’s just a bit longer. Not that much longer – but you’d have to have a pretty practiced hand to get through the "machine noise" that begins to creep in.  – Rob Conery