I had an interesting questions posed to me today:
"Is it possible to clear the contents of all the values within a HashTable in PowerShell but retaining the Key names (i.e. the construct of the hashtable)."
This sounds perfectly acceptable but unfortunately there is not native way of doing this and only have the following options:
1) Set the HashTable variable to $null
2) Rebuild the HashTable from a definition with empty values
Neither of these 2 options are very dynamic or suited the application.
The solution I thought was to loop through the HashTable keys collection and modify the value of one of the entities, however that results in:
Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute.
Our solution is though to use the .Clone() method of the HashTable to build a copy of it in memory just for the sake of looping through it's entities. Here is my example code:
"Is it possible to clear the contents of all the values within a HashTable in PowerShell but retaining the Key names (i.e. the construct of the hashtable)."
This sounds perfectly acceptable but unfortunately there is not native way of doing this and only have the following options:
1) Set the HashTable variable to $null
2) Rebuild the HashTable from a definition with empty values
Neither of these 2 options are very dynamic or suited the application.
The solution I thought was to loop through the HashTable keys collection and modify the value of one of the entities, however that results in:
Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute.
Our solution is though to use the .Clone() method of the HashTable to build a copy of it in memory just for the sake of looping through it's entities. Here is my example code:
$hash = @{FirstName="Bob";LastName="Smith";Age="23"} $hash #create a clone of the hash table, this avoids the # "Collection was modified" enumeration error $hash2 = $hash.Clone(); #loop through each key in the cloned hastable and update the # value in the original table foreach($key in $hash2.keys){$hash[$key] = '';} #clear the cloned hashtable to free memory $hash2 = $null; #just output the hashtable for verification in this demo $hash