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First up,

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let's talk about arrays. An array is a data structure that's

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designed to hold some collection or group of items,

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items, which in our case, is going to be PowerShell objects can be all of the

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same type or of different types. Although, as a general rule,

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we'll be working with arrays that contain objects of all of the same type,

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but that is not a requirement.

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You may also hear people refer to arrays as collections.

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Technically, from a programmatic standpoint, there is,

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I believe, a distinction between an array and a collection,

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but for our purposes, these terms are, in essence,

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interchangeable. Arrays and collections are the same thing.

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So as I said,

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an array is just a collection of things. Now in PowerShell,

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PowerShell is writing objects to the pipeline.

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It can create one object, or it might write multiple objects.

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All of those things can be saved into a variable, and

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that variable, then becomes an array.

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So the array is just a collection of things.

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You can also manually initialize an empty array and then add items to it

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programmatically, either using some operators that we'll look at or for each,

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or you'll see the different ways that we can do that.

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So arrays, nothing complicated here. It's just a collection of

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things. And here is how easy it is to create an array.

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Any comma‑separated list, PowerShell would treat as an array,

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So I have three numbers separated by commas.

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Save the results to $a, $a is an array of the numbers 3, 5, 9.

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If you type $a, PowerShell will automatically unroll or

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display the results of the array, and you can see the

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results listed there vertically.

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You don't have to do anything programmatic or scripting

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in order to see what's in the array.

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Now there are some things that you can do, which we'll get to in a

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moment, to access individual elements of an array,

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but to just see the entire array,

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just type the variable name, and PowerShell will handle the rest.

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The array object itself really doesn't have any meaning other

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than account property we'll look at later. The objects in the

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array, that's what matters.

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So I pipe $a to get‑member. I can see that the type name of each of those objects is an Int32.