PowerShell pretty printer / code cleaner V1

PowerShell Beautifier

Now on GitHub: https://GitHub.com/DTW-DanWard/PowerShell-Beautifier

Formatting Matters

Tabs or spaces; spaces or tabs? If spaces, how many? We sure do take whitespace seriously. But when writing ‘commit-worthy’ PowerShell code, there’s more than just whitespace to think about. Shouldn’t you use cmdlet names instead of aliases? And shouldn’t you have correct casing for cmdlets, methods and types?

PowerShell Beautifier is a PowerShell command-line utility for cleaning and reformatting PowerShell script files, written in PowerShell. Sure, it will change all indentation to tabs or spaces for you - but it will do more than just that. A picture is worth 1KB words; here’s a before/after showing all types of changes including spaces & tabs:

Here's a simpler pic focusing on the alias-replacement and casing changes:

The PowerShell Beautifier makes these changes:

• properly indents code inside {}, [], () and $() groups
• replaces aliases with the command names: dir → Get-ChildItem
• fixes command name casing: get-childitem → Get-ChildItem
• fixes parameter name casing: Test-Path -path → Test-Path -Path
• fixes [type] casing
• changes all PowerShell shortcuts to lower: [STRING] → [string]
• changes other types (if in memory): [system.exception] → [System.Exception]
• cleans/rearranges all whitespace within a line

Now on GitHub: https://GitHub.com/DTW-DanWard/PowerShell-Beautifier

Get file encoding even if no Byte Order Marker

Note: you can find the latest version of the encoding functions in my PowerShell beautifier project:
https://github.com/DTW-DanWard/PowerShell-Beautifier
Check out file src/DTW.PS.FileSystem.Encoding.psm1

Every now and then you need to be able to programmatically determine a file's encoding. Maybe you are writing a utility that edits files and you want ensure you maintain the original encoding type. Perhaps you want to make sure that certain files have a Byte Order Marker (BOM).

If the file has a BOM, this is easy. If it doesn't... aw, crap. At that point you have to analyze the file's contents and make a judgement call based on what you see. I wrote a function to do this: Get-DTWFileEncoding

Get-DTWFileEncoding returns a System.Text.Encoding type based on the file specified. Here's an example of a big-endian file with a BOM:

As you can see, the System.Text.Encoding type is returned and the BOM type has the correct value: FE FF

Here's an example for another big-endian file, this time with no BOM:

The returned Encoding type info looks the same as the first but if you inspect the Preamble, there's no value.

There are some other handy functions in there as well:

• Add-DTWFileEncodingByteOrderMarker - adds a byte order marker file encoding to a file.
• Compare-DTWFiles - compares two files and returns $true if same, $false otherwise.  Uses the two functions below to do comparisons.
• Compare-DTWFilesIgnoringBOM - compares two files, ignoring BOMs, returning $true if same, $false otherwise.
• Compare-DTWFilesIncludingBOM - compares two files, including BOMs, returning $true if same, $false otherwise.

Again, you can get the encoding functions at the beautifier:

https://github.com/DTW-DanWard/PowerShell-Beautifier