Making better use of HashTables in PowerShell

What are HashTables?

HashTables are used for saving Key-Value pairs, where each Key must be unique, whereas their corresponding values may not be unique.

 

Here is the syntax for creating a HashTable:

$ht = @{"Name"="Savindra"; "Age"=33; "Department"="IT"; "City"="Hyderabad"}

When you see the output of the above command by giving $ht, you will notice that the order of the output is not same as we have provided.

With PowerShell Version 3.0 onwards you can preserve the order of properties of the HashTable by using [Ordered] with the HashTable like this:

$ht = [Ordered]@{"Name"="Savindra"; "Age"=33; "Department"="IT"; "City"="Hyderabad"}

This will preserve the order in which you have supplied the values in the HasTable. This time you will notice that the order of properties in input and output is same:

Why are HashTables useful?

Since HashTables can store any kind of values including objects/arrays/HashTables etc., they are great for using within your scripts for providing an output, especially when you want to have some kind of hierarchical output. You can easily convert the HashTables into PSCustomObjects before writing them as output. I will show you two different ways of converting the HashTables into PSCustomObject which is a good way for passing the output to next command in the pipeline.
 

1. Longer way:

$objOut = New-Object -TypeName PSCustomObject -Property $ht
 

This will give us a variable which will return a PSCustomObject as shown below:

However, this same result can be achieved using an easy and shorter way by type casting the HashTable while creating it.

2. in single step:

$objOut = [PSCustomObject][Ordered]@{"Name"="Savindra"; "Age"=33; "Department"="IT"; "City"="Hyderabad"}
 

I hope this is informative for you. Please let me know if you have any queries.

Thank you for reading this post.