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Finally,

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let me show you some other ways that you can format

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strings and information in PowerShell,

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as well as creating custom output that does exactly what you need.

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Let's get the bits service, my favorite service to work with.

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Now we looked at this earlier in the course where if I want to build a

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string that says the bits service is running or is stopped,

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we looked at ways of using sub expressions instead of using concatenation.

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I'm going to show you another way, and that is using the ‑f operator,

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or the format operator.

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In the course downloads,

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I have some links to some Microsoft documentation that will

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explain in a bit more detail what I am doing.

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So I'm going to create a string, and the string has placeholders,

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0 and 1 in curly braces.

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So the string is on the left side of the ‑f operator.

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On the right side of the operator, I have a comma‑separated list of values.

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So I'm getting the name property of the service

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object and then the status property.

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Those go into the corresponding placeholders 0 and 1.

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They don't have to be, by the way, in order.

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If I added something later on, and it was 2,

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like that could go in front of the 0.

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Typically though,

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try to keep them in order as you're getting used to this

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because it'll be easier to keep things straight.

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Now I get the string that says bits is stopped.

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The name and status plugged into the placeholders 0 and 1,

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and I get the string, bits is stopped.

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This may be an easier way to build strings for messages

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that you want to display to a user.

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This may be an easier way to build strings that you might

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want to use in your own PowerShell work.

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Now we can also use this ‑ f operator and format things like dates and numbers.

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So let's format a number.

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There is an f qualifier that we can use.

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So I'm going to take the number that's on the right side,

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1234.56 and so on, that is going to be plugged into the 0 placeholder,

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and then the f qualifier says treat this as a fixed number.

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By default, it truncates it to two decimal points.

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Now it's very important that you recognize here

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that when you use the ‑f operator,

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PowerShell is writing a string to the pipeline.

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So even though this looks like a number, this is actually a string.

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So if you were to use this code in a, say,

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select object expression, and try to sort on the value,

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it's going to sort it as a string, not as a number.

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Here's another example,

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I'm going to format the value as a fixed number with no decimal points,

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again, this is going to be a string, or I can say,

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you know what, I need three decimal points,

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whatever you need.

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Use the n operator, and these qualifiers, by the way, are case sensitive.

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Using the n qualifier has a nice effect of giving you comma output.

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A p will be a percentage, and this includes the percent symbol.

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Again, this is kind of a nice thing to have,

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makes your output maybe a little bit easier to read.

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If you need to specify the number of decimal points,

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you can do p and then the number of decimal points.

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So I'm going to do this to 4, and there is the output.

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There is also the ability to display or format a value in a currency,

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and the currency will default to whatever your

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regional or international settings are.

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So in my case, it's the dollar sign, and I get $23.56.

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These are kind of fun things to play with.

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We also have similar things that we can do with datetime objects.

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So let's create a datetime object $d,

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and I'm going to format this using the d qualifier.

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Now these qualifiers that you're seeing here,

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the lowercase,

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these are the same values that you can use in the

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dash format parameter for Get‑Date.

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So you can see this gives me just a date string.

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Capital D, remember I said they're case sensitive, gives me a long date string.

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There are methods on the datetime object we've looked at

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that will also give you the same result.

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Whether you use the method or the ‑f operator really depends

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upon the context of what you are trying to do.

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A lowercase g gives me a datetime string.

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Again, these are all strings, and f gives it to me with a little more detail.

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Lowercase u gives me that UTC string,

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and I can also format with a case‑sensitive string like this,

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year, day, month, the month is capital M,

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minutes would be lowercase m.

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So I'm trying to build a string, say, for a file name or a directory name,

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this is one way that I could do that, I could save this a variable, and then use that variable in the command to create the item.