How to avoid leading white space addition with string formatting?

Question

I have a function which returns PSCustomObject, like this:

Function Get-Data {
  # ...
  [PSCustomObject]@{
    Url = $Url
    Id = $Id
  }
}

Later on, I call this function like this:

$data = Get-Data

And then I'd like to output formatted string including property values of that object. The closest result to what I want is output with the line below:

Write-Host "$($data.Url)|$($data.Id)|OK"

The problem is a whitespace after the first | character.

Where does it come from? How to get rid of it the proper way?

Probably comes from the original `$Id` value in the `Get-Data` function. `$($data.Id.Trim())` to remove — Mathias R. Jessen, Apr 11 '17 at 09:36
You could also update your function to remove any spaces from beginning or end of the value before it's added to the object `Id = $Id.Trim()` — henrycarteruk, Apr 11 '17 at 11:24

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 11 '17 at 09:38

2

You could either call .Trim() to each string (as Mathias mentioned). Or you can replace any whitespace character using a regex:

Write-Host ("$($data.Url)|$($data.Id)|OK" -replace '\s*')

answered Apr 11 '17 at 09:38

Martin Brandl

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I've finally figured out the issue. I'll describe it in my answer in more details. I'm accepting your answer since it correctly addresses the problem described in the question. Thank you! – Yan Sklyarenko Apr 11 '17 at 12:18

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 11 '17 at 12:24

Apparently, it was all hidden in the details of that Get-Data method, which I airily ignored...

Before creating that custom object, the method does a number of REST API calls, and the output of one of those calls was not assigned to a variable, nor was it "Out-Null"-ed. As a result, the real custom object returned was the one made of that web response plus my explicitly created custom object as a property.

Looks like PowerShell tried hard to infer the types for me, but it failed to manage those leading whitespaces...

Hope this can save someone some time.

Thank you! Had the exact same issue, because I, inside a function, printed a not-yet defined variable, which then, paired with the return statement, apparently introduced a separating whitespace...! — Johny Skovdal, Aug 10 '17 at 13:22

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 23 '17 at 20:05

Just wanted to add another tip on this topic as I was running into it as well. Even though I was seeing no leading whitespace in the return value from within the function. Once the value was returned, there was an extra leading white space. I found that a previous line of Write-Verbose code that was outputing an object's content was messing me up

Write-Verbose $obj | fl * | Out-String

I added parenthesis around the output, which fixed my issue Write-Verbose ($obj | fl * | Out-String)

I'm guessing something about the Out-String part was messing with the function's pipeline and causing the extra white space to get added to the beginning of the string value the function was returning

How to avoid leading white space addition with string formatting?

3 Answers3