Powershell - Substring and pivot of information - text-files

Question

Disclaimer - complete amateur at powershell. I'm basically throwing myself into the deep end to try and learn, so please forgive my ignorance.
Here is my challenge - I have information in txt file format as such (EMC Storage array layouts):
Tier Name: Extreme Performance
Raid Type: r_5
User Capacity (GBs): 4382.54
Consumed Capacity (GBs): 3923.65
Available Capacity (GBs): 458.89
Percent Subscribed: 89.53%
Data Targeted for Higher Tier (GBs): 0.00
Data Targeted for Lower Tier (GBs): 8.02
What I want to offer the storage team is a report on where their goodies are at. So looking to end up with this:
Tier name Raid Type UCap ConCap AvCap %Sub ...etc
Extreme Performance r_5 4382.54 3923.65 458.89 89.53 ...
So it's a combo of, grabbing everything before the ":" as the heading and after the ":" to the CRLF as the data, and pivoting that into a table.
It gets better: there are more blocks of data like this in the txt file, separated by a CRLF, but using the same labels. So need to grab only the data from these and amend them to the table above.
I've gathered that perhaps I need to work a Get-Content and then manipulate the string with a -replace perhaps, but seems like Get-Content reads that first entry (Tier Name:) as a drive. Whoops.
Again, I'm keen to learn and welcome pointers. Been going at it for a few hours now...
Thank you very much.

Answer 1

What I'm understanding, is that you have many blocks like the one you've shown us, and that each block has exactly 8 entries (not more, not less). Also, you want to create a CSV file (am I right?). if I'm right, try this code:
$f="$env:TMP\=in.txt"
gc $f | %{
$csv="$env:TMP\=csv.CSV"
clc $csv -ea Ignore
${#items}=8
$o=[pscustomobject]#{}
}{
$splitted=$_-split':'
if($splitted){
$o|Add-Member $splitted[0] $splitted[1]
if(($o.psobject.properties.count|measure -sum).count -eq ${#items}){
$o|epcsv $csv -Append
$o=[pscustomobject]#{}
}
}
}{
ipcsv $csv -Header 'Tier name','Raid Type','UCap','ConCap','AvCap','%Sub','Higher','Lower'|
select -Skip 1|
ft -AutoSize
}
Notice that $f is the file with all entries; ${#items} is the number of items per block; $csv is the resulting CSV file; I replaced the CSV file headers just when displaying them.
Here's the output for a $f like below:
Tier name Raid Type UCap ConCap AvCap %Sub Higher Lower
--------- --------- ---- ------ ----- ---- ------ -----
Extreme Performance1 r_5 4382.54 3923.65 458.89 89.53% 0.00 8.1
Extreme Performance12 r_5 4382.54 3923.65 458.89 89.53% 0.00 8.12
Extreme Performance123 r_5 4382.54 3923.65 458.89 89.53% 0.00 8.123
Extreme Performance1234 r_5 4382.54 3923.65 458.89 89.53% 0.00 8.1234
Here's an example of $f file content:
Tier Name: Extreme Performance1
Raid Type: r_5
User Capacity (GBs): 4382.54
Consumed Capacity (GBs): 3923.65
Available Capacity (GBs): 458.89
Percent Subscribed: 89.53%
Data Targeted for Higher Tier (GBs): 0.00
Data Targeted for Lower Tier (GBs): 8.1
Tier Name: Extreme Performance12
Raid Type: r_5
User Capacity (GBs): 4382.54
Consumed Capacity (GBs): 3923.65
Available Capacity (GBs): 458.89
Percent Subscribed: 89.53%
Data Targeted for Higher Tier (GBs): 0.00
Data Targeted for Lower Tier (GBs): 8.12
Tier Name: Extreme Performance123
Raid Type: r_5
User Capacity (GBs): 4382.54
Consumed Capacity (GBs): 3923.65
Available Capacity (GBs): 458.89
Percent Subscribed: 89.53%
Data Targeted for Higher Tier (GBs): 0.00
Data Targeted for Lower Tier (GBs): 8.123
Tier Name: Extreme Performance1234
Raid Type: r_5
User Capacity (GBs): 4382.54
Consumed Capacity (GBs): 3923.65
Available Capacity (GBs): 458.89
Percent Subscribed: 89.53%
Data Targeted for Higher Tier (GBs): 0.00
Data Targeted for Lower Tier (GBs): 8.1234
The blank lines may or may not exist.

Answer 2

Well, one route you can take if you're not married to the idea of doing a table is to use the nifty ConvertFrom-StringData cmdlet, which will let you quickly import data in a Name = Value format.
To use that, all we have to do is replace the colons with an equals sign, which we can do like this.
#Setup $string
$string ="Tier Name: Extreme Performance
Raid Type: r_5
User Capacity (GBs): 4382.54
Consumed Capacity (GBs): 3923.65
Available Capacity (GBs): 458.89
Percent Subscribed: 89.53%
Data Targeted for Higher Tier (GBs): 0.00
Data Targeted for Lower Tier (GBs): 8.02"
I didn't have a file with this info, so I just loaded it right into memory in the above step. For your purposes, just run $string=Get-Content -Path .\PathToFile\File.txt to import the content into $string.
Now we can call the universal -Replace operator to replace characters in a string/variable/object, with the following syntax.
$string -replace ":","="
Which gives us this result:
>Tier Name= Extreme Performance
Raid Type= r_5
User Capacity (GBs)= 4382.54
Consumed Capacity (GBs)= 3923.65
Available Capacity (GBs)= 458.89
Percent Subscribed= 89.53%
Data Targeted for Higher Tier (GBs)= 0.00
Data Targeted for Lower Tier (GBs)= 8.02
See that, it's in Name = Value format, precisely what we need for the ConvertFrom-StringData cmdlet. We can now just pipe that right into our convert cmdlet to start working with the data!
$string -replace ":","=" | ConvertFrom-StringData | ft -AutoSize
Name Value
---- -----
Tier Name Extreme Performance
Consumed Capacity (GBs) 3923.65
Data Targeted for Higher Tier (GBs) 0.00
Percent Subscribed 89.53%
Raid Type r_5
Available Capacity (GBs) 458.89
Data Targeted for Lower Tier (GBs) 8.02
User Capacity (GBs) 4382.54
I hope this gets you started on your way!