The other day I saw a script output that was colored with magenta. I was a bit impressed by the readability of the output messages. As I looked to the source code I saw something (ugly) like:
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# Testoutput write-host -nonewline "Creating Link from";write-host -nonewline -f magenta " locationXYZ";write-host -nonewline " to";write-host -nonewline -f magenta " target UVW" |
The output looked like: The Output is not so bad, but the effort is enormous. I came to the idea to encode the colorsettings within the output string. So I ended up with the following Script:
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function write-chost($message = ""){ [string]$pipedMessage = @($Input) if (!$message) { if ( $pipedMessage ) { $message = $pipedMessage } } if ( $message ){ # predefined Color Array $colors = @("black","blue","cyan","darkblue","darkcyan","darkgray","darkgreen","darkmagenta","darkred","darkyellow","gray","green","magenta","red","white","yellow"); # Get the default Foreground Color $defaultFGColor = $host.UI.RawUI.ForegroundColor # Set CurrentColor to default Foreground Color $CurrentColor = $defaultFGColor # Split Messages $message = $message.split("#") # Iterate through splitted array foreach( $string in $message ){ # If a string between #-Tags is equal to any predefined color, and is equal to the defaultcolor: set current color if ( $colors -contains $string.tolower() -and $CurrentColor -eq $defaultFGColor ){ $CurrentColor = $string }else{ # If string is a output message, than write string with current color (with no line break) write-host -nonewline -f $CurrentColor $string # Reset current color $CurrentColor = $defaultFGColor } # Write Empty String at the End } # Single write-host for the final line break write-host } } |
Now it’s possible to use a single string to encode the color by seperating each color with a hashtag (#). Here is an example: The syntax is very simple. Choose a color for the next characters and put it into hashtags (#). To stop coloring the characters just put another hashtag behind the colored characters to reset the foreground color to its default.
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# Testing write-chost "#green#All these characters are green until you end the coloringprocess with a hashtag.# Now everything is default again" |
If you want to use any other charater, or command for the coloring, just replace the hashtag of the split function in line 20 with your character/command. I think this is a usefull function, because script output is often needed and coloring the important parts of the output is sometimes very helpful 🙂 Edit: I edited the script to work even…