PowerShell and CSV files

If you need to process a CSV file, you can use PowerShell's import-csv command. If headers exist in the first line of the CSV, then they will be used as property names on the resulting import-csv output. For example, if you CSV looks like:

Last,First,Middle
Jones,Fred,S
Smith,Sally,M
Johnson,Bob,L

Then you can output the full names like:

import-csv employees.csv |% `
{[string]::format("{0} {1} {2}",$_.first, $_.middle,$_.last)}

Or if you only want last names that start with a "J", you can:

import-csv employees.csv | `
where {$_.last.startswith("J")} |% `
{[string]::format("{0} {1} {2}",$_.first, $_.middle,$_.last)}

Pretty cool, eh?

PowerShell v2 will have the ability to change what the delimiting character is.