Creating an HTML URL from a PowerShell String–#SQLNewBlogger from Blog Posts – SQLServerCentral

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.^[1]

I wrote about getting a quick archive of SQL Saturday data^[2] last week, and while doing that, I had some issues building the HTML needed in PowerShell. I decided to work through this a bit and determine what was wrong.

My original code looked like this:

$folder = "E:DocumentsgitSQLSatArchiveSQLSatArchiveSQLSatArchiveClientApppublicAssetsPDF"

$code = ""
$list = Get-ChildItem -Path $folder
ForEach ($File in $list) {
#write-host($File.name)
$code = $code + "<li><a href=$($File.Name)>$($File.BaseName)</a></li>"
}
write-host($code)

This gave me the code I needed, which I then edited in SSMS to get the proper formatting. However, I knew this needed to work.

I

had used single quotes and then added in the slashes, but that didn’t work. This code:

$folder = "E:DocumentsgitSQLSatArchiveSQLSatArchiveSQLSatArchiveClientApppublicAssetsPDF"

$code = ""
$list = Get-ChildItem -Path $folder
ForEach ($File in $list) {
#write-host($File.name)
$code = $code + '<li><a href="/Assets/PDF/$($File.Name)" >$($File.BaseName)</a></li>'
}
write-host($code)

produced this type of output:

<li><a href="/Assets/PDF/$($File.Name)" >$($File.BaseName)</a></li>

Not exactly top notch HTML.

I decided that I should look around. I found a post on converting some data to HTML^[3], which wasn’t what I wanted, but it had a clue in there. The double quotes.

I needed to escape quotes here, as I wanted the double quotes around my string. I changed the line building the string to this:

$code = $code + "<li><a href=""/Assets/PDF/$($File.Name)"" >$($File.BaseName)</a></li>"

And I then had what I wanted:

<li><a href="/Assets/PDF/1019.pdf" >1019</a></li>

Strings in PoSh can be funny, so a little attention to escaping things and knowing about variables and double quotes^[4] is helpful.

SQLNewBlogger

This was about 15 minutes of messing with Google and PoSh to solve, but then only about 10 minutes to write up.

A good example that shows some research, initiative, and investigation in addition to solving a problem.

The post Creating an HTML URL from a PowerShell String–#SQLNewBlogger^[5] appeared first on SQLServerCentral^[6].

Source: Programming News