INI file parsing in PowerShell

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After searching internet on this topic I’ve found a handful of solutions. All of them are hand parsing of file data so I gave up trying to make standard cmdlets to do the job. There are fancy solutions as this which support writing scenario.

There are simpler ones and as far as I need no writing support I’ve chose following very elegant code snippet:

Function Parse-IniFile ($file) {
  $ini = @{}

  # Create a default section if none exist in the file. Like a java prop file.
  $section = "NO_SECTION"
  $ini[$section] = @{}

  switch -regex -file $file {
    "^\[(.+)\]$" {
      $section = $matches[1].Trim()
      $ini[$section] = @{}
    }
    "^\s*([^#].+?)\s*=\s*(.*)" {
      $name,$value = $matches[1..2]
      # skip comments that start with semicolon:
      if (!($name.StartsWith(";"))) {
        $ini[$section][$name] = $value.Trim()
      }
    }
  }
  $ini
}

This one is Jacques Barathon‘s.

Update Thanks to Aasmund Eldhuset and @msorens for enhancements: whitespace trimming and comment support.

Update 2 Skip any name=value pairs where name starts with a semicolon ; which are comment lines. Replaced $ini [$section] = @{} with $ini[$section] = @{}.

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