One of the things I do at work involves creating scripts to run a Ruby script. For each line in each script I create, I have to:

1. Go to our secondary email program
2. Copy a job name (a word, basically) or an entire line from an error email
3. Change to an editing program (like the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment, a.k.a. ISE)
4. Create a line with the Ruby command line and space for the text I’ve copied from the error email, and add the error email text to that line

Today, I had almost 120 lines to create this way – some of them in two versions

Previously, I did it all by hand – I duplicated the Ruby script portion as many times as I needed, then copied and pasted the error text.

Today, though, contemplating the 200+ lines to create, I decided to dig a bit deeper into the PowerShell ISE.

I discovered I could open a PowerShell script file from disk using:

PS P:\> New-Item -ItemType File test0.ps1
PS P:\> $PSISE.CurrentPowerShellTab.Files.Add(“P:\test0.PS1”)

I then found I could access the open files in the tabbed script panes using standard array indexing notation:

PS P:\> $PSISE.CurrentPowerShellTab.Files[7]                # or [0], [1], [2], etc

With a little more experimentation, I found I could assign the tabbed script to a variable, Save its contents from the command line, and update the Text in the Editor property of the script pane:

PS P:\> $file0 = $PSISE.CurrentPowerShellTab.Files[7]
PS P:\> $file0.Editor.Text = “hello, world”
PS P:\> $file0.Editor.Text += “`n” + “Goodbye, cruel world”
PS P:\> $file0.Save()
PS P:\> Get-Content P:\test0.ps1
hello, world
Goodbye, cruel world

PS P:\>

I then discovered that I could access the current tab directly, without having to use the array indexing notation, or assign the tabbed script to a variable:

PS P:\> $PSISE.CurrentFile.Editor.Text = “”

I then adapted Recipe 8.3 (“Read and Write from the Windows Clipboard”) from the Windows PowerShell Cookbook to write a one-liner:

PS P:\> function Get-Clipboard { Add-Type -Assembly PresentationCore; [Windows.Clipboard]::GetText() }

Finally, I put the Ruby script lines into variables (for example, $ruby_script_1),
defined a new variable $PCE:

PS P:\> $PCE = $PSISE.CurrentFile.Editor

And used the results to add lines to the currently selected script tab:

PS P:\> $PCE.Text += $ruby_script_1 + (Get-Clipboard) + “`n”
# the `n is the PowerShell way to specify a newline character

Now, I just had to

1. Switch to the email program,
2. Copy the job name or full line out of the error email,
3. Switch back to the PowerShell ISE, and
4. Up-Arrow to create each new line

It looks like the same number of steps – but there’s a lot fewer keypresses, so…WIN!!!