Adding “Out-Edit” functionality to PowerShell

Back in March I wrote about useful bits in my PowerShell profile. Recently I’ve wanted to take the results of what I’m doing into an editor. It’s easy enough to pipe a result into CLIP.EXE which puts it in the clipboard, but it’s not too hard to use the object model of PowerShell ISE to do it directly. 

Function Out-Edit {
  Param   ( [parameter(ValueFromPipeLine= $true)][Alias('Text')]$inputObject, 
            [String]$Before,
            [String]$After,
            [Switch]$New
           )
   begin   { if ($new)   {$Editor = $psise.CurrentPowerShellTab.Files.Add().editor }
            else         {$Editor = $psise.CurrentFile.Editor }
            if ($before) {$Editor.InsertText($before) } 
           }
   process { $Editor.InsertText($inputObject ) }
   end     { if ($after) {$Editor.InsertText($after) } }
}

I gave the function a –new switch to decide if the input goes into the current file or a new one. And to allow the input to be topped and tailed – typically with something like $Foo=@" and "@ to make my output into a here-string , it’s just a case of getting a new or current file’s editor and calling its .InsertText() method

Note: In that March piece I showed my replacement for the default PSEDIT function, in the end I merged it with the function above and I’ve put my profile.ps1 on skydrive. In the end I changed the NEW switch, to a “UseExisting” switch, because I found that I almost always needed the new option.