When Exporting to CSV I'm receiving System.String[] in spreadsheet

Question

Hello,

When I run the following PowerShell command:  Get-NcExportRule -vserver *

all the columns on the screen populate with the proper information, however when I export it to a .csv file, the columns Protocol, RoRule, RwFule and SuperUser are all populated with System.String[].

Anyone have any suggestions?

HUX20002000 · Accepted Answer

That's happening because those columns are arrays rather than strings (hence the curly brackets in the onscreen output) and Export-Csv doesn't know what to do with those. There are various ways to deal with that. I usually use PowerShell custom objects with the 'join' operation for columns that have arrays. For example:

$output = @()

$rules = Get-NcExportRule

foreach($rule in $rules)

{

$output += [pscustomobject]@{

'PolicyName' = $rule.PolicyName

'RuleIndex' = $rule.RuleIndex

'ClientMatch' = $rule.ClientMatch

'Protocol' = $rule.Protocol -join(', ')

# etc.

}

$output | Export-Csv -Path [\path	o\.csv] -NoTypeInformation

So if 'Protocol' for a particular rule shows as '{nfs3, cifs, flexcache}' onscreen (for example), it will display as 'nfs3, cifs, flexcache' in the .csv file.