How to Extract Data from Text Files with PowerShell

PowerShell is a Windows administrator tool that is used to perform administrator-level tasks. PowerShell is such a powerful tool that it can perform the tasks that GUI(Graphical User Interface) can’t perform. Users can extract data from a text file by utilizing PowerShell’s cmdlet “Get-Content”. The “Get-Content” cmdlet is specially designed to get or extract the data from text files at the specified location. It will get the contents one line at a time.

This post will elaborate on the methods to extract data from files.

How to Extract Data via/from Text Files with PowerShell

These are the instances that will be approached to explain the extraction of data from text files with PowerShell:

• Extract the data from a text file.
• Extract the limited number of lines from a text file.
• Extract data from more than one file.
• Extract the last three lines of a text file.
• Extract the user-specified line from a text file.

Example 1: Use the “Get-Content” Cmdlet to Extract the Data via/from a Text File

First, launch the PowerShell as an administrator, then, write the “Get-Content” cmdlet along with the “-Path” parameter and assign the text file path to which the user wants to extract the data:

Example 2: Use the “Get-Content” Cmdlet to Extract the Limited number of lines from a Text File

In PowerShell, to extract the desired number of lines, simply, add the “-TotalCount” parameter along with the code and assign the lines count such as “3”:

Example 3: Use the “Get-Content” Cmdlet to Extract the Data from Multiple Text Files

In order to get the data of all the files in a specified folder, simply, add the asterisk “*” symbol right after the backslash of the folder name:

Example 4: Use the “Get-Content” Cmdlet to Extract the Last Three Lines of a Text File

To retrieve the last three lines from a text file, first, get the file by writing the “Get-Item” cmdlet and specify the file path by using the “-Path” parameter. After that pipe the code to the cmdlet “Get-Content”. Then, utilize the “-Tail” (Use to get the last lines only) parameter and assign the value “3” to it:

Example 5: Use the “Get-Content” Cmdlet to Extract a Specific Line from a Text File

First, write the code to specify the total number of lines using the “-TotalCount” parameter and wrap the code inside the small braces. Then, write a specific number within the large brackets to get the specific line:

It can be observed that the specific line was displayed in the console.

Conclusion

To extract the data from a text file in PowerShell, the “Get-Content” cmdlet is used. To extract the data from a text file, first, place the “Get-Content” cmdlet along with the “-Path” parameter and then assign the file path. This post has elaborated on the method to extract data from text files with PowerShell.