Accessing values of object properties in PowerShell

Question

I'm going through an array of objects and I can display the objects fine.

$obj

displays each object in my foreach loop fine. I'm trying to access the object fields and their values. This code also works fine:

$obj.psobject.properties

To just see the names of each object's fields, I do this:

$obj.psobject.properties | % {$_.name}

which also works fine.

When I try to access the values of those field by doing this:

$obj.psobject.properties | % {$obj.$_.name}

nothing is returned or displayed.

This is done for diagnostic purposes to see whether I can access the values of the fields. The main dilemma is that I cannot access a specific field's value. I.e.

$obj."some field"

does not return a value even though I have confirmed that "some field" has a value.

This has baffled me. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Shay Levy · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-29 15:10:23Z

25

Once you iterate over the properties inside the foreach, they become available via $_ (current object symbol). Just like you printed the names of the properties with $_.Name, using $_.Value will print their values:

$obj.psobject.properties | % {$_.Value}

answered Jul 29, 2013 at 15:10

Shay Levy

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2 Comments

Victor Zakharov Over a year ago

+1. I suspected something as obvious as this, so went ahead to check, but you posted your answer by the time I came back. As a side note to OP - you could have discovered the Value property by doing this: $obj.psobject.properties | gm.

starcodex Over a year ago

I did that for diagnostic purposes to see whether I could access the values of the fields. However when I try to access the value of a certain field that I know exists, like $obj."certain field", nothing is returned

seg · Accepted Answer · 2021-09-12 09:27:47Z

10

You don't have to iterate over all properties if you just need the value of one of them:

$obj.psobject.properties["foo"].value

edited Sep 12, 2021 at 9:27

answered Sep 4, 2017 at 19:26

seg

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1 Comment

gargoylebident Over a year ago

Whhat is "bla"?

Joey · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-29 15:22:18Z

9

Operator precedence interprets that in the following way:

($obj.$_).Name

which leads to nothing because you want

$obj.($_.Name)

which will first evaluate the name of a property and then access it on $obj.

answered Jul 29, 2013 at 15:22

Joey

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4 Comments

starcodex Over a year ago

I thought of that as I usually incorporate parentheses for this exact reason. Still does not yield what I want.

Joey Over a year ago

That's weird. A simple test for me was $a = gci | select -f 1; $a.psobject.properties|%{$_.Name + "tt" + $a.($_.Name)} which works just fine.

x0n Over a year ago

Another way is with quotes: $obj."$($_.name)"

Joey Over a year ago

@x0n: That's a little overkill, though, to use a double-quoted string with a sub-expression when you can just use parentheses (or the sub-expression without the surrounding string).

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