How to remove NULL char (0x00) from object within PowerShell
I have a .CSV file that I created using SQL Server's BCP command-line BULK-COPY utility to dump a bunch of database tables.
Since I want to import these .CSV file's using Powershell and convert them to a nice report using the format-table cmdlet, I'm having issues with columns lining up, etc,. because some columns contain NULLs from SQL Server. I don't have the option to convert the NULL from SQL Server first; due to the way I'm exporting the table to CSV.
Therefore, I would like to remove all NULLs from the .CSV file prior to trying to pipe it into the format-table cmdlet.
My basic code is below:
$CSV=import-csv "c:\temp\tablename.csv"
$CSV | format-table -autosize | out-string -width 4096 >"C:\TEMP\tablename.txt"
I've tried doing something like:
$CSV | -replace($null,"") | format-table -autosize | out-string -width 4096 > "C:\TEMP\tablename.txt"
but I'm still getting the NULLs.
Does anyone know how to remove the NULLs from my CSV so I can display a nice tabular report. I want to get these .TXT reports imported into SVN but the NULLs are going to cause me problems, plus it skews the reports.
CSV file as shown in a hex editor:
00000EA0h: 31 38 39 2C 31 31 39 2C 37 35 29 2C 77 68 69 74 189,119,75),whit
00000EB0h: 65 2C 77 68 69 74 65 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C e,white,,,,,,,,,
00000EC0h: 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C 2C ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
00000ED0h: 2C 2C 0D 0A 61 63 62 34 33 5F 30 31 2C 4F 4E 2C ,,..acb43_01,ON,
00000EE0h: 00 2C 32 37 2C 39 39 2C 2F 61 63 62 34 33 5F 30 .,27,99,/acb43_0
00000EF0h: 31 2F 34 33 62 61 6C 61 6E 63 65 73 2E 67 69 66 1/43balances.gif
Notice at EE0h the first character is NULL, 0x00.
Answer
After a bit of playing around, I finally figured out that this syntax worked:
(Get-Content "C:\temp\tablename.csv") -replace "`0", "" | Set-Content "C:\temp\tablename.csv"