Chapter 16. Working with files, text, and XML
This chapter covers:
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
Henry Ward Beecher
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
Groucho Marx
In this chapter, we’re going to cover PowerShell’s features for processing text and files. We’ll look at how PowerShell deals with file paths and concepts behind the provider model. We’ll revisit regular expressions and take another look at the language features and cmdlets that are provided for dealing with text. This chapter also covers the features that PowerShell offers for dealing with a special kind of text—XML—as strings and in files. In the process, you’ll see how to use the .NET classes to accomplish tasks when the native PowerShell language features may not be sufficient.