In Today’s article we will have a look at how you can read data from the two main filetypes you can feed your PowerShell Script.

1- From a TXT file

A text file is useful if you want to provide a list of entries, each row will contain one piece of information, I will say, that this is the simplest and easiest way to feed information to your .PS1 script.

Let’s suppose we have a list of items file called “ListItems.txt“, which will look like this:

Your code which will loop over each line and output the result will look like this:

$List= Get-Content ListItems.txt
foreach ($item in $List) {
    Write-Host $item
}

When we run this script :

2- From a CSV file

If you want to have multiple information in your input files (example a list of products), you can use a CSV file.

My input file “listitems.csv” look like this:

And the script to read each line and output each column will be :

$List= Import-CSV ListItems.csv
foreach ($item in $List) {
    Write-Host $item.Product
    Write-Host $item.Description
    Write-Host $item.Price
    Write-Host "------------"
}

Please note that we can use the column name as a property of the $item (which is the line ref in our scenario)