PowerShell: Basic Understanding of Rows and Columns and CSV file

What’s up ladies and dudes!

Relation in this topic:

1. Rows and Columns
2. Loops
3. CSV file
4. PowerShell

I think playing with Rows and Columns is every beginner programmer’s nightmare. Rows and Columns concept is all the same for all coding languages. There’s no black magic here. Is all about the basic understanding and common sense. I’ve seen many fresh graduate find it difficult to understand the rows and columns and tend to overthink and turn their codes into a complex dark hole.

What you understand?

You come about FOR LOOP, WHILE LOOP or DO…WHILE LOOP. To identify Rows and Columns in loops form, let’s take FOR Loop as example, so below image is how you use the FOR Loop concept to get or apply table values. Inner FOR loop is define as your column, and the outer FOR loop define as your row.

So clear about it? In PowerShell, the concept is the same but it has been simplify with a command “Import-csv“.

What the beginners does?

This is the sample code that I have seen too much, in the beginners.

By apply this you will get duplicated result;

How PowerShell does it?

Now, let’s see the code for PowerShell, I’m going to show you how you get value list of rows and columns from Excel file, aka CSV file format.

This is the csv file for example, we have 2 columns with naming/attribute, UserPrincipalName and EmailAddresses as the first row. This is the view from excel and the view from notepad is different. Notepad, the columns are separated by a delimiter “,”

To put them into PowerShell, you just need a single FOR Loop to perform.

Lets output the result you will get is this, if you want to beautify your result is possible.

Is just that simple!