PowerShell: How to read contents from text files without converting the lines into an array

Apparently, PowerShell’s get-content cmdlet automatically converts the contents of text files into an array of strings, splitting the contents at the line breaks (see Using the Get-Content Cmdlet). In many cases this is convenient:

Contents of file test.txt:

1
2
3

gc text.txt | % { write-host "line: " $_ } line: 1 line: 2 line: 3

However, if you need the file’s contents as an unchanged string (e.g. to keep line breaks the way they are when working with Unix/Linux line endings) this is not what you want. In this case, you can use the .NET method File.ReadAllText() (see File.ReadAllText Method:
[System.IO.File]::ReadAllText("text.txt") 1 2 3

Über Stefan

Polyglot Clean Code Developer

2 Kommentare

  1. Peter Kriegel
    3. Juli 2012 um 18:08:12

    You can even Use this to get the whole thing in one chunk:
    $Content = Get-Content test.txt -ReadCount 0

  2. Stefan
    3. Juli 2012 um 19:19:30

    Hi Peter, your code also returns an array and not the whole file content as a single String, or am I missing something here?

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