Argthtjtr

I would like to run a java application on windows but color some output lines different background and foreground colors based upon matching text.

Is this possible with Windows powershell? How would I go about doing that?

As in my simple example below you could try matching your output and colouring accordingly.

$Items = @("Find","Matching","Item")

$colItem = "Matching"



foreach ($i in $Items) {



    if ($i -match $colItem){

      write-host  $i -foregroundcolor magenta -BackgroundColor yellow}

     else {write-host $i}

}

--Edit--

Taking it further with a rough working example (only checked with ps4) "grepping" the Get Help cmdlet output for the Phrase PowerShell. will give coloured ouput for the first Phrase per line

 Function Coloured-Output {

    Process { 

       $i = "PowerShell"

       If ($_ -match $i){

          $iPosition = $_.IndexOf($i)       # start position of "grep phrase"

          $iLength = $i.Length              # length of grep phrase

          $iEnd = $iPosition + $iLength     # end of grep phrase

          $LineLength = $_.Length           # length of line

          $iComplete = $LineLength - $iEnd  # length of characters to complete the line

          Write-Host $_.Substring(0,$iPosition) -NoNewline

          Write-Host $_.Substring($iPosition,$iLength) -Foregroundcolor Blue -BackgroundColor cyan -NoNewline

          Write-Host $_.Substring($iEnd,$iComplete)

       }

       else {write-host $_ }

    } # End of Process

} # End of Function



$SplitThis = Get-Help



   $SplitThis -split ("`n")  | Out-String -stream | Coloured-Output

• The Short answer is simply no.




• The Long answer is that anything is possible, but ...

Unfortunately any coloring and string operations in PowerShell is a royal PITA. The reason is that the out-of-the-box Windows console terminals are using their own way to color in/out, and not using escape sequences for coloring.* [See note!] This (AFAIK) always require using Write-Host. So any color operations soon become counter productive as they often require extensive Windows engineering, to work around too early output and not being able to easily store colors in a string variable.

Either way, here is a more useful solution for highlighting unsafe ExecutionPolicy settings. (Basically a working modification of Antony's answer.) Here it is using a preset search criteria (as an array), but could probably be modified and converted to a proper ColorGrep(<string>) function.

# To get the ExecutionPolicy List

Function Get-MyPolicy {

    $ZZ_EPOL = ((Get-ExecutionPolicy -List) | Format-Table -hideTableHeader @{Label="ExePol"; e={"        {0,-16}: {1,-20}" -f $_.Scope, $_.ExecutionPolicy}})

    $ZZ_EPOL

}



# Colorize the unsafe Execution Policies

Function ColorMatch {

    Process {

        $polkeys = @("Bypass","Unrestricted")

        foreach ($line in $_) {

            foreach ($i in $polkeys) {

                $res =''

                If ($line -match $i) {

                    $iPosition  = $line.IndexOf($i)         # start position of "grep phrase"

                    $iLength    = $i.Length                 # length of grep phrase

                    $iEnd       = $iPosition + $iLength     # end of grep phrase

                    $LineLength = $line.Length              # length of line

                    $iComplete  = $LineLength - $iEnd       # length of characters to complete the line



                    $res  = (Write-Host $line.Substring(0, $iPosition) -NoNewline)

                    $res += (Write-Host $line.Substring($iPosition, $iLength) -ForegroundColor Red -NoNewline)

                    $res += (Write-Host $line.Substring($iEnd, $iComplete) -NoNewline)

                    Write-Host $res

                    break  # There's only one match per line

                }

            } # END foreach 2

            If (($res -eq '') -and ($line -ne '')) { 

                Write-Host $line 

            } 

        } # END foreach 1

    } # END process

}

To run this, use:
Get-MyPolicy | Out-String -stream | ColorMatch

The output is:

Finally, if you need to pass in other strings, you may need to parse the $line and $_ input to separate the strings into lines. Since the script is assuming that there is only one match per line. That is why the Out-String is used.

NOTE:

Recently Windows 10 has added some color capability. However, there are dozens of 3-rd party console solutions that already does this.