CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershell
Andrew Madsen
Andrew Madsen

Reputation: 165

Powershell will not return a hash table key value

I have a variable that is a hash table:

PS C:\depot\code\rp4vm> $skey


key              value
---              -----
Splitter version 5.2.P1(a.362)
OS version       VMkernel na1-pdesx09

I am trying to access the values for the keys but I cannot seem to. No matter how I address them I get nothing:

PS C:\depot\code\rp4vm> $skey."Splitter version"

PS C:\depot\code\rp4vm> $skey["Splitter version"]

I checked to see if it had key and value pairs:

PS C:\depot\code\rp4vm> $skey.key

Splitter version
OS version
PS C:\depot\code\rp4vm> $skey.value

5.2.P1(a.362)
VMkernel na1-pdesx09.americas.global-legal.com

I am running PowerShell 7 and nothing else appears to have changed in the help files on how to handle hash tables. Does anyone have an idea as to how I can capture the information?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2429

Answers (2)

iRon
iRon

Reputation: 23862

To complement the answer from @Theo, I suspect that is actually concerns a list of KeyValuePair objects, like:

$skey = 
    (new-object 'System.Collections.Generic.KeyValuePair[String, String]' 'Splitter version', '5.2.P1(a.362)'),
    (new-object 'System.Collections.Generic.KeyValuePair[String, String]' 'OS version', 'VMkernel na1-pdesx09'),
    (new-object 'System.Collections.Generic.KeyValuePair[String, String]' 'OS version', 'VMkernel na2-other')

Anyways, the difference between a hash table and a list of [KeyValuePair] (or [pscustomobject]) objects is that a list of objects doesn't require unique keys (as shown in the example above). Meaning that the problem could be that converting them to a hash table, might overwrite duplicate keys.

To retrieve the specific key from the list use:

($skey | Where key -eq 'Splitter version').Value
5.2.P1(a.362)

or multiple keys:

($skey | Where key -eq 'OS version').Value
VMkernel na1-pdesx09
VMkernel na2-other

Upvotes: 0

Theo
Theo

Reputation: 61253

What you have is definitely not a Hashtable. More likely it is an array of objects that have properties key and value like this

$skey = [PsCustomObject]@{'key' = 'Splitter version'; 'value' = '5.2.P1(a.362)'},
        [PsCustomObject]@{'key' = 'OS version'; 'value' = 'VMkernel na1-pdesx09'}

To demonstrate:

$skey | ForEach-Object {
    Write-Host ('{0} = {1}' -f $_.key, $_.value)
}

Should show

Splitter version = 5.2.P1(a.362)
OS version = VMkernel na1-pdesx09

You can convert to a Hashtable if you like:

$hash = @{}
$skey | ForEach-Object {
    $hash[$_.key] = $_.value
}

Typing this on mobile, so hopefully got the formatting right..

Upvotes: 2

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