Question

I have problem with data in the file. Data in the text file looks like:

ADSE64E...Mobile phone.....................                           
EDW8......Unknown item.....................                           
CAR12.....Peugeot 206 with red colour......            
GJ........Parker model 2...................                         
Por887W8..Black coffe from Peru............  

The dots represents blank spaces. First column is Product_Code (long 1-10) and second (long 1-255) is Description. All i need is:

ADSE64E;Mobile phone                           
EDW8;Unknown item                          
CAR12;Peugeot 206 with red colour           
GJ;Parker model 2.                         
Por887W8;Black coffe from Peru 

My solusions are:

1. First column get to the variable (and same process with second column) and merge both variables to one.. But i dont know how..

   $variabletxt = get-content C:\Product.txt

   $firstcolumn = $variablestxt.substring(1,10)

   $secondcolumn = $variablestxt.substring(10)

   $final = ???

2. Replace blank spaces but problem is that product_code may by long 1-10.

Have you any suggestion how I resolve this problem?

Answer 1

split your sting then replace “more than one space” with nothing :

gc file.txt |%{
($_.substring(0,9)  -replace "[ ]{2,}","")+";"+($_.substring(10,254)  -replace "[ ]{2,}","")+";"
}