Loop through a CSV Column

Question

I have a short script in which I am recursively searching for a string and writing out some results. However I have hundreds of strings to search for, so I would like to grab the value from a CSV file use it as my string search and move to the next row.

Here is what I have:

function searchNum {
#I would like to go from manual number input to auto assign from CSV
$num = Read-Host 'Please input the number'
get-childitem "C:\Users\user\Desktop\SearchFolder\input" -recurse | Select String -pattern "$num" -context 2 | Out-File "C:\Users\user\Desktop\SearchFolder\output\output.txt" -width 300 -Append -NoClobber
}

searchNum

How can I run through a CSV to assign the $num value for each line?

Answer 1

Do you have a CSV with several columns, one of which you want to use as search values? Or do you have a "regular" text file with one search pattern per line?

In case of the former, you could read the file with Import-Csv :

$filename   = 'C:\path\to\your.csv'
$searchRoot = 'C:\Users\user\Desktop\SearchFolder\input'

foreach ($pattern in (Import-Csv $filename | % {$_.colname})) {
  Get-ChildItem $searchRoot -Recurse | Select-String $pattern -Context 2 | ...
}

In case of the latter a simple Get-Content should suffice:

$filename   = 'C:\path\to\your.txt'
$searchRoot = 'C:\Users\user\Desktop\SearchFolder\input'

foreach ($pattern in (Get-Content $filename})) {
  Get-ChildItem $searchRoot -Recurse | Select-String $pattern -Context 2 | ...
}

Answer 2

I assume you need something like this

$csvFile = Get-Content -Path "myCSVfile.csv"
foreach($line in $csvFile)
{
    $lineArray = $line.Split(",")
    if ($lineArray -and $lineArray.Count -gt 1)
    {
        #Do a search num with the value from the csv file
        searchNum -num $lineArray[1]
    }
}

This will read a csv file and call you function for each line. The parameter given will be the value in the csv file (the second item on the csv line)