Powershell: Reading in a column from a .CSV file and then adding a specific string to the beginning and exporting again

Question

I'm attempting to write a script which will read in a CSV generated by querying AD for user information (that part is done) but then will allow me to add a string to the beginning of each value of a column in the CSV file and then export it.

For instance we have this CSV file:

"displayname","Office"
Bob,7142
Janet,8923
SantaClaus,0912
NicCage,0823

I want to take each entry for "Office", add the string "BUG" before it and then export it back out. The modified CSV should look like:

"displayname","Office"
Bob,BUG7142
Janet,BUG8923
SantaClaus,BUG0912
NicCage,BUG0823

At this point, I've been attempting to read in just the "Office" column and then displaying it with "Write-Host". The idea being that if I can do that then maybe I can create a new variable that would be something like:

$BUG = "BUG"
$NewVar = $BUG$Office

Which would hopefully look like the second CSV file. I am extremely new to powershell scripting.

The attempts I've made so far are these:

Attempt #1:

$UserList = Import-CSV C:\Users\username\CSV.csv
$UserList | ForEach-Object ($_.Office) { $UserList }

Attempt #2:

$projectName = import-csv  C:\Users\username\CSV.csv | % {$_.Office}
$BUG = "BUG"
$projectName | ForEach-Object ($_) {$projectName}

Attempt #3:

$UserList = Import-CSV C:\Users\username\CSV.csv
#ForEach ($Office in $Userlist) {
#Write-Host $UserList.Office
#}

Attempt #4:

Import-Csv "C:\Users\username\CSV.csv" -Header       ("displayname","Office","whenCreated","EmailAddress") | Select-Object Office | Export-CSV -Path C:\users\Username\test.csv

I have gotten it to read out just the Office numbers before using the ForEach-Object loop structure but then it never stops reading out the office numbers so that's unhelpful.

I think I'm going in the right direction, but I just can't figure out how to modify a column like this.

Mathias R. Jessen Mathias R. Jessen · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-22T14:01:45

Instead of trying to extract the Office column, just pipe the full data set (all columns) to ForEach-Object, change the value of the Office property and pipe it back to Export-Csv:

$Prefix = "BUG"
Import-Csv .\file.csv | ForEach-Object {
    $_.Office = $Prefix + $_.Office
    $_
} | Export-Csv .\file_modified.csv -NoTypeInformation

Powershell: Reading in a column from a .CSV file and then adding a specific string to the beginning and exporting again

1 Answers