PowerShell Tip: How to “shift” arrays…
It's fairly common in scripts to extract the first element out of an array then "shift" the remaining elements. Perl has a special shift operator for doing this as do many of the UNIX shells. PowerShell, however, doesn't have a shift operator built-in. So how do we shift arrays in PowerShell? Well – we could do it the brute force way and simply copy all of the elements after the first one but that sounds like too much work. A way to make it a bit easier is to use the range operator ('..') and array slices as shown:
$first = $oldArray[0]
$oldArray = $oldArray[1 .. ($oldArray.count-1)]
But that's still too much typing. In practice, PowerShell's multiple assignment feature is the most effective way to handle this kind of thing. Consider the following array:
PS (1) > $a = 1,2,3,4,5
We can use multiple assignment to split this array into $first and $rest simply by doing:
PS (2) > $first, $rest = $a
The first element from the array is placed into $first, the remaining elements are copies into $rest
PS (3) > $first
1
PS (4) > $rest
2
3
4
5
If we don't care about the first element, then we can use $null instead of $first and the value will simply be discarded.
PS (5) > $null, $rest = $rest
PS (6) > $rest
3
4
5
PS (7) >
This is actually a pretty handy approach to solving a variety of list restructuring problems. For example, say we have a list that looks like:
PS (7) > $list = "one",1,"two",2,"three",3
The form of this list is simply a name followed by a value:
PS (8) > $list
one
1
two
2
three
3
Now I want to "fold" that list into a hashtable as a set of key/value pairs. Here's a one-liner that will do this:
PS (9) > $hash = @{} ; while ($list) { $key, $value, $list = $list; $hash[$key]=$value }
The first two elements of the list go into $key and $value. The remaining elements are assigned back to $list. This loops until $list is empty. The resulting hash table looks like:
PS (10) > $hash
Name Value
---- -----
two 2
three 3
one 1
-bruce
Bruce Payette [MSFT]
Windows PowerShell Tech Lead
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell
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