Five-Project Series

Parse Text Data with PowerShell you own this product

prerequisites
intermediate PowerShell (use variables, common PowerShell built-in cmdlets, conditional and loop statements)
skills learned
PowerShell text parsing • transform text into PowerShell objects, read text files, write to text files, create reports from plain text, work with complex regular expression patterns, edit and replace text, use PowerShell operators and methods to work with text
Fernando Corrales
5 weeks · 5-7 hours per week average · INTERMEDIATE

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team

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XYZ Services Company, a consulting and outsourcing firm, recently experienced a massive failure in its IT infrastructure. As a PowerShell developer, you’ll help keep payroll and other critical processes running while its systems are down. Applying PowerShell best practices, you’ll write scripts that parse text data, convert it into objects, export objects to CSV files, generate formatted HTML reports, correct erroneous values in specific fields, replace text conditionally, identify and classify matching strings that satisfy specific conditions, and generate reports from multiple text files. By the end of this liveProject series, you’ll have practical experience working with simple to advanced regex expressions, the switch statement, and a variety of PowerShell cmdlets and operators that you can put to good use creating PowerShell objects, reports, and logs.

These projects are designed for learning purposes and are not complete, production-ready applications or solutions.

The series flows well and builds up skill. I learned a great deal more than I’d expected to.

Ranjit Sahai Sahai, President, RAM Consulting Corporation

liveProject mentor Chris Parsonson shares what he likes about the Manning liveProject platform.

here's what's included

Project 1 Break Strings into Substrings

You’re a PowerShell developer working for XYZ Services Company, a consulting and outsourcing firm that recently experienced a massive failure in its IT infrastructure. While it’s working on getting the environment back up and running, you’ve been given the critical, time-sensitive task of helping avoid payroll delays. The good news is the company’s employee directory has already been extracted. The bad news is it’s been saved as plain text files, a hard-to-work-with format for payroll purposes. Applying PowerShell best practices, you’ll write scripts that parse text data and convert it into objects that are in a payroll-manageable format.

Project 2 Find, Replace, and Extract Text

XYZ Services Company, a consulting and outsourcing firm, recently experienced a massive failure in its IT infrastructure. While it’s working on getting the environment up and running again, the marketing director wants to email partners a report that includes contact information for all the marketing staff. As a PowerShell developer, your task is to write a PowerShell script that extracts properties from the plain-text employee directory file, uses those properties to build a custom PowerShell object, and exports the object to a CSV file which you’ll use to generate an HTML report that’s formatted for the marketing director’s purpose. As a favor to the HR department, you’ll also write a PowerShell script that corrects values in a specific field within the source file and writes the edited content to a new file.

Project 3 Conditionally Replace Text

As a PowerShell developer, your critical mission is to help XYZ Services company, the consulting and outsourcing firm you work for, avoid payroll delays after a massive failure in its IT infrastructure. To meet a requirement in the input process to payroll, the HR department needs an update to the state field in the source file to be changed from the employee’s state of residence to the state of the office they report to. Using PowerShell best practices, you’ll write a script that uses the switch statement, PowerShell cmdlets, and advanced regex expressions to read the input file, return a list of the unique states within the file, replace the state value according to the predefined conditions—and keep those paychecks coming.

Project 4 Identify Similar String Patterns

XYZ Services Company, the consulting and outsourcing firm you work for, recently experienced a massive failure in its IT Infrastructure. While it’s working on getting the environment back up and running, the company urgently needs to identify potential vulnerabilities in the digital signatures used by the employees for two-factor authentication. Applying PowerShell scripting best practices, you’ll write a script that uses the switch statement and its regex parameter to extract a list of digital signatures from an input file, identify matching strings that satisfy specific conditions, classify them as required, and send them to log files. When you’re done, the information security officer will thank you for helping prevent future security issues.

Project 5 Report from Multiple Text Files

XYZ Services Company, the consulting and outsourcing firm you work for, is getting up and running after a massive IT infrastructure failure. In the meantime, the Human Resources department would like a report with basic staff data that it will use to distribute payslips to employees. As a PowerShell developer, you’ll use the switch statement and its file parameter to read and extract information from the source files provided by the company’s Active Directory before the system failed, build PowerShell objects, and export them into CSV format—helping HR provide proof of payment and putting your coworkers’ minds at ease.

book resources

When you start each of the projects in this series, you'll get full access to the following book for 90 days.

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I learned an incredible amount and have already implemented two scripts in my working life based on knowledge gained from this course.

Chris Parsonson, Helpdesk Team Leader, Agile ICT

It’s good practical experience for using PowerShell. Accomplishing a task is the easiest way to learn a new language. It moves from theory to practical.

Jeff Hill, Consultant, SQLAegis

project author

Fernando Corrales
Fernando Corrales is a cloud engineer with several years of IT experience in multinational companies. He’s worked extensively with VMware products, focusing on private cloud automation with PowerCLI and PowerShell, in addition to delivering PowerShell training for some of his recent employers. Fernando holds several technical degrees from the Tecnológico de Costa Rica and has a personal blog: fercorrales.com.

Prerequisites

This liveProject is for technology administrators and intermediate-level PowerShell users who want to expand their text and string parsing skills. To begin these liveProjects you’ll need to be familiar with the following:

TOOLS
  • Intermediate PowerShell, version 7 preferred (scripting, pipeline, cmdlets, operators)
  • Visual Studio Code (basic experience working with the PowerShell extension)
TECHNIQUES
  • Text parsing using PowerShell

features

Self-paced
You choose the schedule and decide how much time to invest as you build your project.
Project roadmap
Each project is divided into several achievable steps.
Get Help
While within the liveProject platform, get help from other participants and our expert mentors.
Compare with others
For each step, compare your deliverable to the solutions by the author and other participants.
book resources
Get full access to select books for 90 days. Permanent access to excerpts from Manning products are also included, as well as references to other resources.