Select the values of one property on all objects of an array in PowerShell

arrays, member-enumeration, powershell

Solution

I think you might be able to use the `ExpandProperty` parameter of `Select-Object`.

For example, to get the list of the current directory and just have the Name property displayed, one would do the following:

ls | select -Property Name

This is still returning DirectoryInfo or FileInfo objects. You can always inspect the type coming through the pipeline by piping to Get-Member (alias `gm`).

ls | select -Property Name | gm

So, to expand the object to be that of the type of property you're looking at, you can do the following:

ls | select -ExpandProperty Name

In your case, you can just do the following to have a variable be an array of strings, where the strings are the Name property:

$objects = ls | select -ExpandProperty Name

Problem

Let's say we have an array of objects $objects. Let's say these objects have a "Name" property. This is what I want to do ``` $results = @() $objects | %{ $results += $_.Name } ``` This works, but can it be done in a better way? If I do something like: ``` $results = objects | select Name ``` `$results` is an array of objects having a Name property. I want $results to contain an array of Names. Is there a better way?

Original source