asked on

Powershell Hyperlinks

Hi,

I'm trying to embed a hyperlink in a html table this is the line of code.

$result | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name 'More Detail' -Value "<a href='$comp.html'>$comp</a>" | ConvertTo-HTML -Fragment

and the formatting is

$a = "<style>"
$a = $a + "BODY{background-color:white;
font-family:Tahoma;
font-size:7pt;}"
$a = $a + "TABLE{border-width: 1px;border-style: solid;border-color: black;border-collapse: collapse;}"
$a = $a + "TH{border-width: 1px;padding:0px;border-style: solid;border-color: black;background-color:thistle}"
$a = $a + "TD{border-width: 1px;padding:0px;border-style: solid;border-color: black;background-color:palegoldenrod;a:link.navlink { color:#0000cc }"
$a = $a + "</style>"
$a = $a + "</FONT>"

But the hyperlink is not working i'm just seeing the following

More Detail

<a href='Alex-PC.html'>Alex-PC</a>

any advice on getting the hyperlink working

footech

I think I need more detail. I don't see where $a is relevant to the question. What are you wanting to see from the link?

Alex Young

ASKER

Thought you might need to see the formatting incase i'm missing something, I have got all the data for computers coming in a table but one of the colums is a hyperlink which is generated by another script to collect the software on that particular computer.

So when it runs you should be able to click on the link on the hardware inventory and it will link to that relevent $comp variable.html, I'm now rethinking it but not sure how to get the data in SQL so learning that - Would you suggest that putting the data into a SQL DB be easier to pull out these kind of reports?

footech

Maybe the issue is the use of single quotes. You might try
$result | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name 'More Detail' -Value "<a href=""$comp.html"">$comp</a>" | ConvertTo-HTML -Fragment

I hardly ever use SQL I wouldn't be the best to advise you.

footech

OK, I see what is happening. ConvertTo-HTML is treating the <, >, and " characters as literal. Found a webpage that described this at http://jdhitsolutions.com/blog/2012/04/create-an-html-powershell-help-page/
On the page it just mentioned < and > characters, but in my testing " was also converted. So I modified his function. You will be able to pipe HTML to it fix the characters as shown on the last line.

Function Convert-HTMLEscape {
 <#
 Convert &lt; and &gt; to < and >
 It is assumed that these will be in pairs
 Also convert $quot; to "
 #>
[cmdletbinding()]
Param (
 [Parameter(Position=0,ValueFromPipeline=$True)]
 [string[]]$Text
 )
  Process
  {
    foreach ($item in $Text)
    {
      if ($item -match "&lt;")
      {
        (($item.Replace("&lt;","<")).Replace("&gt;",">")).Replace("&quot;",'"')
      }
      else
      {
        #otherwise just write the line to the pipeline
        $item
      }
    }
  } #close process
} #close function

$result | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name 'More Detail' -Value "<a href=""$comp.html"">$comp</a>" | ConvertTo-HTML -Fragment | Convert-HTMLEscape

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Alex Young

ASKER

Hi, Thanks for that but still same issue for some reason it's picking up the variable so changes that to the correct computers but it's displaying the following

<a href="Alex-PC.html">Alex-PC</a>

It's so random if i take away the css formatting it all works i'm just wondering if something is wrong with that line of code.

Would it help if i show the whole code?

footech

Perhaps. I think the HTML would be more helpful (at least a couple lines relevant to the link).

Alex Young

ASKER

I've attached - it's got some of me testing but see if you can figure it out its driving me mad lol something so simple :)
Full-HardwareSoftware---Copy.txt

footech

Thanks. How about the HTML source (at least part of it that is relevant)?

Alex Young

ASKER

ah sorry, here it is the line for the hyperlink

<td><a href="Alex-PC.html">Alex-PC</a></td></tr>
</table>
</body></html>

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

footech

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Alex Young

ASKER

Brilliant!!! Solved It thank you so much knew it be something simple :) this is the working code

$results | ConvertTo-Html -Title "PC Inventory" -head $PCInvFormattingPage -Body $PCInvFormatting | Convert-HTMLEscape | Out-File $htmlFile