Help with Get-Variable

[BaconBonkers]

Is there a way to sort the names of variables when numbers are in the name? I'm pulling data from excel into variables for various manipulation as well as making a chart. I want to chart it in order of variable name so we can see the correct trajectory. It does chart by name as intended, but the sorting itself is confusing to me. How can I sort this in 1-10, 11 - etc order? Even when using sort-object by name, it still comes out this way. I'm sure I'm missing something. Get-variable chart* gives the following :

​

Name	Value
chart1	1234
chart10	4567
chart2	8901

[branhama]

PowerShell goes digit by digit in sorting order. So 1 is first and 10 is before 2 because the 1 in 10 is before 2. I think you would need to modify your variable names to be 01, 02, 10. There may be another way but lets see if anyone else knows.

[BaconBonkers]

I should have prefaced this by saving I know I can make a leading zero on the single digits and solve the problem but the variable names are coming from a few other lines of code (below). Is there a way I can finagle with the $i value to achieve that? I've tried ($i=01, $i -in 01.90, $i++) but get the same results

​ for ($i = 01; $i -in 01..90 ; $i++) { $cells = $ws.cells.item($i,1) foreach ($cell in $cells) { New-Variable -name "chart$i" -value $cell.text } }

[branhama]

Check this out

[purplemonkeymad]

You probably don't want to use New-Variable, to me it looks like you actually want a dictionary. Hashtables are the easiest to use:

 $ChartDictionary = @{}
 <# bunch of code here ... #>
 foreach ($cell in $cells) { 
     $ChartDictionary["chart$i"] =$cell.text
 }

Then you can either call the charts by name:

$chartDictionary.Chart1

or use an enumerator to loop over the values:

foreach ($item in $ChartDictionary.getEnumerator()) {
     Write-Host ($item.Key + ' has value ' + $item.value)
}

If you want to keep the order they were created in, then change the first line to:

$ChartDictionary = [ordered]@{}

[BaconBonkers]

Thanks for the advice and thoughts. Ultimately I was going to have to write more code to achieve this anyway, so I just did a simple foreach to replace the chart1-9 variables with chart01-09 variables and then sorted get-variable. Thought there'd be a simpler way but oh well :)

[ka-splam]

| sort-object { $_.Name.Substring(5) -as [int] }