gglossover

Programming

PowerShell Arrays and that annoying number on the screen

When you create an array and populate it in PowerShell the number of elements is written out to the screen, very annoying.

e.g.

function Array-Error() 
{ 
    $Array = New-Object System.Collections.ArrayList 
    $Return = "ReturnValue" 

    $Array.Add("Value1") 
    $Array.Add("Value2") 
    $Array.Add("Value3") 
    $Array.Add("Value4") 

    return $return 
}

$display = Array-Error 
write-host -ForegroundColor Red $display

Output

0 1 2 3 ReturnValue

So how do we stop the numbers from being displayed to the screen, while Fix 2 is the proper way I like fix 1 as it reminds me of passing things over to “/dev/null” when I was a UNIX chap.

function Array-Fix1() 
{ 
    $Array = New-Object System.Collections.ArrayList 
    $Return = "ReturnValue" 

    $Array.Add("Value1") > $null 
    $Array.Add("Value2") > $null 
    $Array.Add("Value3") > $null 
    $Array.Add("Value4") > $null 

    return $return 
} 

$display = Array-Fix1 
write-host -ForegroundColor Magenta $display

Output

ReturnValue

or

function Array-Fix2() 
{ 
    $Array = New-Object System.Collections.ArrayList 
    $Return = "ReturnValue" 

    $Array.Add("Value1") | Out-Null 
    $Array.Add("Value2") | Out-Null 
    $Array.Add("Value3") | Out-Null 
    $Array.Add("Value4") | Out-Null 

    return $return 
} 

$display = Array-Fix2 
write-host -ForegroundColor Magenta $display

Output

ReturnValue

TaggedPowerShell