PowerShell One-Liner: Stripping Comments and Blanks
I know, I know, XML is the new standard. There are still times where flat files are easier. Time is short, and I'm lazy. (I'm also impatient and working on hurbis. Geek-points if you can tell me where that's from.)
Anyhow, here's a quick-and-dirty way to strip out comments, whitespace and blank lines from a text file.
(
Get-Content $listFile) -replace '#.*' -replace '^\s+' -replace '\s+$' | Where-Object {$_};
Where-Object here has a very simple task. If $_ is not null, then it's true, so pass it on. PowerShell v1 has a nasty habit of iterating into nulls in an array, resulting in some fairly paranoid loop scripting.