I have a friend who runs a small mailing company. He has an upcoming project where he needs to send out a bunch of brochures to various people; in most cases, each envelope he sends out will contain multiple brochures – but not all will contain the same number of brochures. In other words, the postage will be different on each letter.<\/p>\n
So he’s already built this great CSV file containing addresses and the needed postage for each address. Problem is, the postage software he uses can’t read the postage from the file – it can only read the address. So he needed to split his one file into seperate files – one output file for each postage rate.<\/p>\n
His input file looks like this:<\/p>\n
Name,Company,Address1,Address2,City,State,ZIP,Cost,Qty<\/p>\n
And he needed his output file to look the same way. Doing this in VBScript isn’t a huge hassle… you read through the file, create a new output file for each rate class you encounter, and write lines out. But it’s not a super-short script, either. So I got to thinking – wouldn’t PowerShell be easier for this?<\/p>\n
The beauty of PowerShell, and the thing to remember, is that you almost never<\/em> have to parse text – you work with objects<\/em>. Check this out:<\/p>\n$csv = Import-Csv "input.csv"
<\/span>$rates = $csv | select cost -unique
foreach<\/span> ($rate in<\/span> $rates) {
$file = $rate.tostring() + ".csv"
<\/span> $csv | where { $_.cost -eq<\/span> $rate.cost } | Export-Csv $file
}<\/pre>\n