Small Tips and Tricks – PowerShell – how to read content from text file

Hi All,

Greetings for the day!!!

Today new small but useful finding

Background / Use Case

In one of our PowerShell script we need to read the credentials (Username / Password OR Client APP ID / Client Secret Key OR Certificate password) from local text file

Details

• Get-Content CMDLET is used to read the text file from given path
• Get-Content CMDLET reads file line by line
• Example – Following is the content in sample text file – “credentials.txt”
  • Username
  • Password

$creds = Get-Content -Path <Path of text file>

$creds = Get-Content -Path “credentials.txt”

• By default, Get-Content reads every line in a text file and creates an array as its output with each line of the text as an element in that array.
• So, output of above command will be

Username
Password

Syntax

Get-Content
   [-ReadCount <Int64>]
   [-TotalCount <Int64>]
   [-Tail <Int32>]
   [-Path] <String[]>
   [-Filter <String>]
   [-Include <String[]>]
   [-Exclude <String[]>]
   [-Force]
   [-Credential <PSCredential>]
   [-Delimiter <String>]
   [-Wait]
   [-Raw]
   [-Encoding <Encoding>]
   [-AsByteStream]
   [-Stream <String>]
   [<CommonParameters>]

Get-Content
   [-ReadCount <Int64>]
   [-TotalCount <Int64>]
   [-Tail <Int32>]
   -LiteralPath <String[]>
   [-Filter <String>]
   [-Include <String[]>]
   [-Exclude <String[]>]
   [-Force]
   [-Credential <PSCredential>]
   [-Delimiter <String>]
   [-Wait]
   [-Raw]
   [-Encoding <Encoding>]
   [-AsByteStream]
   [-Stream <String>]
   [<CommonParameters>]

Simple example

• Lets have simple text file – “credentials.txt” with following content

user name – prasham@knowledgejunction1.onmicrosoft.com

password – LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL

Script to read above file

#Get-Content demo

# Get-Content <File Path>
$credentialFileContent = Get-Content "C:\Prasham\Articles\PowerShell\getcontent\credentials.txt"

Write-Host " "

Write-Host "All file content - " $credentialFileContent
Write-Host " "

#Get-Content reads file line by line in text file and creates an array
Write-Host "Content at Line 1" $credentialFileContent[0]
Write-Host "Content at Line 1" $credentialFileContent[1] 

Output of the above script will be

PS C:\> C:\Prasham\Articles\PowerShell\getcontent\getcontent.ps1

All file content -  user name - prasham@knowledgejunction1.onmicrosoft.com password - LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL

Content at Line 1 user name - prasham@knowledgejunction1.onmicrosoft.com

Content at Line 1 password - LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL

Thanks for reading !!! HAVE A FANTASTIC TIME AHEAD !!! LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL 🙂