Retaining newlines in PowerShell string

Question

In a PowerShell script, I'm capturing the string output of an EXE file in a variable, then concatenating it with some other text to build an email body.

However, when I do this I find that the newlines in the output are reduced to spaces, making the total output unreadable.

# Works fine
.\other.exe

# Works fine
echo .\other.exe

# Works fine
$msg = other.exe
echo $msg

# Doesn't work -- newlines replaced with spaces
$msg = "Output of other.exe: " + (.\other.exe)

Why is this happening, and how can I fix it?

score 14 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 13 '10 at 20:34

14

Or you could simply set $OFS like so:

PS> $msg = 'a','b','c'
PS> "hi $msg"
hi a b c
PS> $OFS = "`r`n"
PS> "hi $msg"
hi a
b
c

From man about_preference_variables:

Output Field Separator. Specifies the character that separates the elements of an array when the array is converted to a string.

answered Dec 13 '10 at 20:34

Keith Hill

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Upvoting this, because only after your answer did I grok that `$msg` isn't being set to a single string, but an *array of lines* which are by default concatenated with spaces. – JSBձոգչ Dec 13 '10 at 21:00
Great time saver and hidden gem. Excellent! – Scott Saad Jan 19 '11 at 20:16
Great answer! Thank you! – LPChip Apr 30 '21 at 12:27

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 13 '10 at 17:52

Perhaps this helps:

$msg = "Output of other.exe: " + "`r`n" + ( (.\other.exe) -join "`r`n")

You get a list of lines and not a text from other.exe

$a = ('abc', 'efg')
 "Output of other.exe: " + $a


 $a = ('abc', 'efg')
 "Output of other.exe: " +  "`r`n" + ($a -join "`r`n")

Retaining newlines in PowerShell string

2 Answers2

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