I'm trying to learn Powershell. I tend to do better when I have real world puzzles to solve.
Today, someone wanted an inventory of devices from our firewall manager.
Luckily, you could export a list of the devices that it was managing, but it exported it in a .dat file.
That .dat file was compressed. Fortunately, 7Zip seemed to know what type of compression it was, so I simply extracted the list using 7Zip.
The list was kind of json formatted. I wanted a csv file because it's easier to work with.
I say kind of because if I opened it in Notepad++, it had extra data at the top and bottom. Reason being is so that if I wanted to import the list back into the manager, the manager could process it.
I tried using the data as it was in Powershell. Powershell did not like it one bit.
Get-Content -Raw list | ConvertFrom-Json
Invalid Json Primitive
<a bunch of red error messages here>
So, I opened it in Notepad++ and removed the extra data at the top and bottom of json data. Still a bunch of red error messages.
Added a curly bracket at the top { and a curly bracket at the bottom}. Powershell finally did something with it. So, I tried this.
Get-Content -Raw list | ConvertFrom-Json | ConvertTo-Csv | Out-File list.csv
It kind of worked. The data I wanted was in a couple of arrays though. So I had to do this:
Get-Content -Raw list | ConvertFrom-Json | Select -Expand <array name here> | Select -Expand <another array name here> | Select name,"serial number" | ConvertTo-Csv | Out-File list.csv
Bingo! It had a header and a footer in the csv - something to do with Powershell, but it worked. I just opened it in Excel and removed the header and footer. I saved it as an Excel doc. Seems to be fine.
