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

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

whf_netapp — Sun, 11 May 2025 19:22:52 GMT

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?

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

HUX20002000 — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 06:28:19 GMT

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\to\.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.

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

whf_netapp — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 22:23:02 GMT

Thank you very much. This worked perfectly and I learned something.