CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershellcmdpowershell-2.0
Hoda Fakharzadeh
Hoda Fakharzadeh

Reputation: 747

How can I sort by column in PowerShell?

how can I sort a text file by 3rd column in PowerShell? That is part of the file:

    reza             zabihi          12     1
    maryam           joraee          17     2
    leyla            ahmadi          13     2
    farzin           farahbakhsh     16     1
    keyvan           maleki          8      1
    kaveh            ahangar         18     1
    nooshafarin      bakhtiari       13     2
    roya             afrashteh       13     2
    asghar           nazemi          18     1
    jaleh            nooruzi         16     2
    ali              samadi          6      1
    mohsen           adibi           3      1
    firooz           karimi          7      1
    mostafa          rostamian       18     1
    jafar            omidi           6      1
    shima            zagrosi         12     2
    somayyeh         modaberi        16     2
    shahram          zamani          16     1
    sayeh            rahmati         3      2
    shirin           rahjoo          12     2

I tried

Get-Content namef | Sort-Object { [double]$_.Split()[-2] } -Descending

Upvotes: 5

Views: 24687

Answers (3)

user7818749
user7818749

Reputation:

So you already have 2 answers on how to get the result, I am adding one on how to send the email, which was part of your original requirement. You edited the question removing it, but I already did most of the answer, so I am posting it regardless.

Use powershell's Send-MailMessage which comes standard on a windows system by running it in a batchfile:

NOTE!! It must be powershell 2.0 or later.

powershell Send-MailMessage 
           -From "[email protected]"
           -To "[email protected]"
           -Subject "Test email"
           -Body "This is a test"
           -SmtpServer Some_exhange_server_name

I broke down the above text using newlines for readability, but it should be a single line as per below.

Send-MailMessage -From "[email protected]" -To "[email protected]" -Subject "Test email" -Body "This is a test" -SmtpServer some_exhange_Server_name

All you have to do still is to replace the body text This is a test with the variables from the relevant solution you choose and from the other answers.

Upvotes: 1

Ansgar Wiechers
Ansgar Wiechers

Reputation: 200293

You're almost there already. The reason why your code doesn't work the way you expect is that the Split() method splits the string at each space, so you're getting a lot of empty columns. What you actually want is to split at consecutive whitespace. To do the latter use the -split operator:

Get-Content namef | Sort-Object { [double]($_ -split '\s+')[-2] } -Descending

Upvotes: 9

Mark Wragg
Mark Wragg

Reputation: 23355

Here's one potential solution:

Get-Content yourfile.txt | ForEach-Object {
    $Line = $_.Trim() -Split '\s+'

    New-Object -TypeName PSCustomObject -Property @{
        FirstName = $Line[0]
        LastName = $Line[1]
        FirstValue = [int]$Line[2]
        SecondValue = [int]$Line[3]
    }

} | Sort-Object FirstValue | Format-Table

This uses Get-Content to load your file, then uses a ForEach-Object loop to iterate through each line of that file (where the line is represented by the automatic variable $_).

It uses the .Trim() method on the line to remove the trailing whitespaces, then splits the line using the RegEx string \s+ which represents one or more spaces.

After this $Line is now an array with each element excluding the spaces, so we create a custom PowerShell object where we give each item a name and access it's corresponding value from $Line via the Array index operator [0]..[1] etc. We cast the value columns as [int] so that they will be sorted later correctly (vs it treating them like strings).

Now that we've output a PowerShell object, we can simply pipe out result to Sort-Object with the FirstValue property and then send that to Format-Table to get a table result.

Upvotes: 6

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