PowerShell format TimeStamp with Custom Message appended

Question

Novice to PowerShell. Trying basic examples.

I'm trying to append TimeStamp to a Custom Message while writing information to log file.

function Get-TimeStamp {
    return Get-Date -Format yyyymmdd_hhmmss
}
write-host '[INFO].['$(Get-TimeStamp)'] Message'

The output comes as below:

[INFO].[  20184827_054844 ] Message

Can someone please point out me in getting rid of the extra spaces before and after timestamp?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 27 '18 at 07:01

1

Just got it by doing basic Googling

I just needed to enclose contents in Double Quotes

write-host "[INFO].[$(Get-TimeStamp)] Message"

answered Mar 27 '18 at 07:01

Rupesh

95
3
13

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 27 '18 at 07:40

In addition to Rupesh's answer- It is giving you extra spaces because it's how powershell unravels or expand the subexpression which you are concatenating and writing to host

Other ways to do what you want are presented below: With "+" string concatenation operator

write-host ('[INFO].['+$(Get-TimeStamp)+'] Message')
---> [INFO].[20183327_033349] Message

See related question and info here:

How do I concatenate strings and variables in PowerShell?

Windows Powershell Language Specification Ver 3.0 Starting page 21

PowerShell format TimeStamp with Custom Message appended

2 Answers2