Question

I’m attempting to write a Twitter Powershell script that will use community created interfaces PoshTwitter with the Twitter API to attempt and find a list of followers who are potential spammers.

I have a feeling that my problem lies not with the particular cmdlet I’m calling (Get-TwitterFollowers), but rather with the difference between assigning a variable:

If I try this:

$rawFol = get-twitterfollowers -page $page -raw 1

$rawFol is different than if I do this:

get-twitterfollowers -page $page -raw 1 > .\page$page.txt
$rawFol = gc .\page$page.txt

The Get-TwitterFollowers cmdlet returns an XML file converted to string.

What things can I try to determine the differences between these two assignments? They look like they’d result with same content.

Answer 1

The difference you’re seeing is how powershell handles new lines in strings. When calling the get-twitterfollowers CmdLet, it is either returning a single string or an array of strings. My guess by your description is that it returns a string. So the $rawFol variable will have a single string value. Any new lines are simply embedded into the string value.

The second command you write the return to a file. Now all of the newlines in the string are represented as lines in the file. Later when you call gc on that file, each line will be returned as a separate string. So the $rawFol variable will now have an array of strings.