Filtering Objects in PowerShell based on a List of Accepted Values

I was writing a script the other day where I want to return a collection of Services based on the name.  It took me a few minutes to figure out how to do this, so I thought I’d jot it down.  Nothing revolutionary, but I’ve definitely found this pattern to be handy.

Let’s start with a comma separated list of objects we want to filter by.  In this case I only want to return objects that start with “a”, “c”, “e”, or “g”.  I’ll take that list, and split it into an array.

# List we want to filter against
# Split it into an array
$filterList = ‘a,c,e,g’.Split(",")

Next, I’ll generate a collection of objects to try and filter.  I’ll just use a function to make life easy:

# Function to generate a collection of objects to test on
function Create-TestCollection {
    # Turn this into an object to filter
    $objectList = 'a,b,c,d,e,f,g'.Split(",")
    
    foreach($object in $objectList)
    {
        $output = new-object PSObject
        $output | add-member noteproperty Name $object
        
        Write-Output $output 
    }
}

# Populate the variable to test with our collection of objects
$collection = Create-TestCollection

Now $collection contains a list of objects with a single Name property containing “a”, “b”, “c”, “d”, etc.

Now list filter $collection using a Where:

Write-Host "Objects from the Collection where the Name property exists in an Array"
# Filter the collection of objects based on a CSV list
$collection | Where {$_.Name -and $filterList -eq $_.Name }

And it will return only the objects from our initial comma separated list:

Name                                                                                     
----                                                                                     
a                                                                                        
c                                                                                        
e                                                                                        
g    

This also works with other strings:

# An array we want to filter
$collection2 = 'a,d,g,j,m'.Split(",")

Write-Host "Strings in an Array where that exist in an Array"
# Filter the collection of objects based on a CSV list
$collection2 | Where {$_ -and $filterList -eq $_ }

Strings in an Array where that exist in an Array
a
g

Enjoy…

David