Question

Here it’s my code :

Write-Host "Field 1 : " $variable1  
Write-Host "Field 2 : " $variable2
Write-Host "Field 3 : " $variable3
Write-Host "Field 4 : " $variable4

I get an output like :

   Field 1    : " $variable1    
   Field 2          : " $variable2
   Field 3      : " $variable3
   Field 4           : " $variable4

How can I align them?

Thanks

Answer 1

I think, based on his previous questions that field1,2,3 … are db fields names with variable length.

first solution, not very elegant but you can use the -f format operator to add some extra white-spaces to align your second column (bellow we use 40 characters minus the length of first column)

$field1=@("name";"username1")
$field2=@("age";24)
$field3=@("email";"[e-mail]")

wh $field1[0] " : " $field1[1] 
wh $field2[0] " : " $field2[1]
wh $field3[0] " : " $field3[1]

wh

#fill some extra whitespaces 
$spaces1=40 - $field1[0].Length
$spaces2=40 - $field2[0].Length
$spaces3=40 - $field3[0].Length
"{0}{1,$spaces1}" -f $field1[0], " : "+$field1[1]
"{0}{1,$spaces2}" -f $field2[0], " : "+$field2[1]
"{0}{1,$spaces3}" -f $field3[0], " : "+$field3[1]

result

name  :  username1
age  :  24
email  :  [e-mail]

name                                  : username1
age                                   : 24
email                                 : [e-mail]

Second solution

If you create pscustom objects, then you can use all those fancy cmdlets such as format-table 🙂 :

$col=@(
[PSCustomObject]@{$field1[0]=$field1[1]},
[PSCustomObject]@{$field2[0]=$field2[1]},
[PSCustomObject]@{$field3[0]=$field3[1]}
)

$col |ft

Result :

Name                           Value                                                                                 
----                           -----                                                                                 
name                           username1                                                                             
age                            24                                                                                    
email                          [e-mail]