Almost two years ago, I learned about a cool project that does some very clever string manipulation. I started messing around with Humanizer and extending existing Types to add some new properties that show off the functionality of Humanizer. Doug Finke started a project at the same time to do the same thing, but using functions. So, we combined our efforts to create one module, PowerShellHumanizer. I, personally, haven’t done much with it since then. Until last week.

I was writing yet-another-exe-wrapper module and wanted a way to take PowerShell-style, PascalCase parameters and turn them into named parameters the EXE was expecting without writing if ($PSBoundParmeter.ContainsKey('AnotherParameter')) {"another_parameter=$AnotherParameter")} over and over for each property for each function. When I started thinking about parsing parameter names, I remembered that is exactly what Humanizer and sure enough, it already has an Underscore method. Bingo. Now I can loop through all the bound parameters and build string of arguments for the EXE and use that same code for every single function.

$cmdArray = New-Object System.Collections.ArrayList

foreach ($key in $TaskParams.Keys)
{
    $name = $key.Underscore
    [void]$cmdArray.Add("$name=$($TaskParams[$key])")
}

return $cmdArray -join ' '

This builds up a list of arguments in the format parameter_one=value assuming the PowerShell function parameter is ParameterOne.

If I had had to write that Underscore functionality myself, I probably would not have even bothered and just ended up writing all those if-thens. I happened to co-author this particular module, but it still demonstrates the power of community and the PowerShell Gallery.

This week, I started working on this post and realized I was manually converting a Title Case string to a URL slug which led to another contribution to the PowerShellHumanizer module — ConvertTo-HyphenatedString.

PS C:\> "Continuing To Make Powershell A Bit More Human" | ConvertTo-HyphenatedString
continuing-to-make-powershell-a-bit-more-human

See the URL in the address bar? PowerShell to the rescue.

But wait, there’s more. Just a couple of days ago, Jason Shirk posted a suggestion to add custom formatting to some types. Brilliant! Why didn’t we think of that before? I added support for TimeSpan like Jason suggested as well as the LastWriteTime and Length properties for DirectoryInfo and FileInfo. Here’s a Gif Doug recorded to demonstrate the feature.

With these three ways of Huamnizing PowerShell, there is probably a lot more we can do.

Do you have any suggestions?