Question

Using PowerShell ISE or VSCode, create a PowerShell script that will do the following:

You are going to create an HTML web page report from a standard processed report. You will use the text file “STUDENTS.TXT” located on Canvas.

The script must meet the following requirements:

1. The output file should be named ITS3410-{your name}.htm
2. Every line of data that has a student number (9999-9999) must be included in the report
3. All data must be trimmed
   1. No leading white space
   2. No trailing white space
   3. No empty values
   4. No garbage lines
4. The student number MUST be detected using regular expression (regex)
5. You must include comments in your code to explain it
6. The report headers must be visible in the HTML web page

Answer 1

What we need to accomplish?

• To process the input list of text
• To prepare structured html report based on data in input

Now we can apply the Henry Ford method to these basic tasks ('Every task is simple if split into sufficiently small steps'):

• Remove unnecessary content from input (remove craplines, clean up important lines)
• Detect the structure of the content (That will especially require you to interpret the header)
• Applying knowledge of the structure to parse the data content (hint: The output should be objects)

I have used PowerShell to create the script and to check it by executing the script.

#Input and Output Files


$inputFile = Get-Content c:\users\sharp\desktop\STUDENTS.txt     #getting input file
$output_file = ‘c:\users\sharp\desktop\ITS3410-praveen.htm’         #to get the output file


$FileLine = @()
Foreach ($Line in $inputFile) {
$MyObject = New-Object -TypeName PSObject

#adding the objects

Add-Member -InputObject $MyObject -Type NoteProperty -Name Student# -Value $Line
Add-Member -InputObject $MyObject -Type NoteProperty -Name LAST -Value $Line
Add-Member -InputObject $MyObject -Type NoteProperty -Name FIRST -Value $Line
Add-Member -InputObject $MyObject -Type NoteProperty -Name DN -Value $Line
Add-Member -InputObject $MyObject -Type NoteProperty -Name ERN -Value $Line
Add-Member -InputObject $MyObject -Type NoteProperty -Name HR -Value $Line
Add-Member -InputObject $MyObject -Type NoteProperty -Name STS -Value $Line
Add-Member -InputObject $MyObject -Type NoteProperty -Name DEG -Value $Line
Add-Member -InputObject $MyObject -Type NoteProperty -Name CON -Value $Line
Add-Member -InputObject $MyObject -Type NoteProperty -Name VER -Value $Line
Add-Member -InputObject $MyObject -Type NoteProperty -Name GPA -Value $Line

$FileLine += $MyObject
}

#to convert the script into html
$FileLine | ConvertTo-Html -Property Student#, LAST, FIRST, DN, ERN, HR, STS, DEG, CON, VER, GPA -body "<H2>Student Report</H2>" | Out-File $output_file

Invoke-Expression $output_file

$line = "9999-9999  PRAVEEN KUMAR N  85 12     4       CER CSC      2007A          2.68"

$strings = $line -split " " | Where-Object { $_ }

# Bulk add properties

$props = @{

               StudentID = $strings[0]

               Surname =   $strings[1]

               Firstname = $strings[2]

               DN = $strings[3]

               ERN = $strings[4]

               HR = $strings[5]

               STS = $strings[6]

               DEG = $strings[7]

               CON = $strings[8]

}

# Add more properties by name

$props["VER"] = $strings[9]

$props["GPA"] = $strings[10]

# Build Object

New-Object PSObject -Property $props

This method is useful to keep in mind as it is a highly flexible method you will be able to apply in many scenarios.

As for working with strings (which we'll need to do lots of times), we can try running this on the console:

"foo" | gm

This will list us all properties and methods of the string class. We can check out the method names - lots of useful utility there.

Regular Expression (regex) for the Student Number to be recognized:

$str = (Get-Content ... -Raw) -replace '\r'

$cb = {

  $args[0].Groups[1].Value -replace '(?m)^.{7}' -replace '(?m).(.{3}).{5}$', '$1'

}

$re = [regex]'(?m)^(?<=-\n)((?:\d{4}\s\d{2}[^\n]*\d{5}(?:\n|$))+)'

$re.Replace($str, $cb)