Turning Objects into Hash Tables

In one of the previous tips we examined how Get-Member can retrieve the property names for an object. Here is another use case that takes any object, turns it into a hash table with sorted properties, and excludes empty properties.

# take an object...
$process = Get-Process -id $pid 

# ...and turn it into a hash table
$hashtable = $process | ForEach-Object {

  $object = $_

  # determine the property names in this object and create a
  # sorted list
  $columns = $_ | 
    Get-Member -MemberType *Property | 
    Select-Object -ExpandProperty Name |
    Sort-Object
  
  # create an empty hash table
  $hashtable = @{}

  # take all properties, and add keys to the hash table for each property
  $columns | ForEach-Object {
    # exclude empty properties
    if (![String]::IsNullOrEmpty($object.$_))
    {
      # add a key (property) to the hash table with the
      # property value
      $hashtable.$_ = $object.$_
    }
  }
  $hashtable
} 


$hashtable | Out-GridView

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