PowerShell Collections: Array

December 19th, 2019
7 min read

Get-TableOfContents -Headings @(

'Square Brackets - What do they do?'
'Types of Arrays'
'Array Performance'

) | How

When I started writing PowerShell I quickly realized that there are several ways to create collections of items and they all have different uses and behaviors. PowerShell will automatically create an array for you if something returns several results, but sometimes you need to create an array, arraylist or list manually. What are the differences, use cases and how do they work?

In this first part of a series of posts focusing on collection types we will take a look at arrays, as they are usually the first type of collection you come across when looking for a traditional “list” in PowerShell.

Square Brackets - What do they do?

If you’ve ever seen code where a variable has square brackets after the type, it shows that it’s an array. For example an array of objects of the type [string] would look like [string[]]. Although creating arrays is easy, you’re rarely in a situation where you’re required to say that an array is of a specific data type in PowerShell, since PowerShell isn’t a very hard-typed language. Most of the times you create arrays through either getting several results from a command, or by creating an empty array.

The type System.Object has a method called GetType() that we can use to figure out what type our created object is, which is useful since everything in .NET derives from System.Object. We can also use Get-Member as long as we don’t simply pipe our array to it, as that would call the command on the individual items in the collection and not show us the type of the actual array. If we really want to pipe our array to Get-Member we can do it using Write-Output with the parameter NoEnumerate, otherwise we can simply use the InputObject parameter instead of the pipeline.

PipeHow:\Blog> (Get-Service).GetType().FullName
System.Object[]
PipeHow:\Blog> Get-Member -InputObject (Get-Service)

   TypeName: System.Object[]

Name           MemberType            Definition
----           ----------            ----------
Count          AliasProperty         Count = Length
Add            Method                int IList.Add(System.Object value)
Address        Method                System.Object&, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089 Address(int )
Clear          Method                void IList.Clear()
...

As we can see, when we declare an array without specifying a type, PowerShell simply creates a collection with the type System.Object[], an array of items with the type System.Object. This allows for one array to contain several different types, since everything is an object.

We can explore this further by looking at the hidden PSObject property of any object in PowerShell. It contains a collection called TypeNames with the different types that the object inherits from, all the way to the top where System.Object resides as the base type.

PipeHow:\Blog> (Get-Service)[0].PSObject.TypeNames
System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController
System.ComponentModel.Component
System.MarshalByRefObject
System.Object

Many of the collection types in .NET share the same classes that they inherit from, which lets us work with them in a similar way. We can access elements in arrays and other lists using square brackets, which is what I did just now to refer to the first element of the array that Get-Service returns. Arrays start at 0, so the first element of a collection is referred to by appending [0].

PowerShell has countless tools to work with arrays and other types of collections, such as loops, the pipeline and all of the different methods that come with the .NET classes.

Types of Arrays

Almost every collection of items in PowerShell is an object array if you haven’t declared it as something else. You can declare your own arrays as well, either by declaring an empty array that can contain any type of object, or by specifying a type.

There are many ways to declare arrays in PowerShell. It often involves using @(...) to cast something into an array, but can be done in other ways as well.

# Empty array
$MyArray = @()

# Array with one element 
$MyArray = @(1)
# The comma forces PowerShell to interpret it as an array
$MyArray = ,1

# Array with several elements
$MyArray = @(1,2)
$MyArray = 1,2

All of the above will result in a System.Object[] array, just as the commands we’ve previously run. The only difference between the results of the commands is the actual content of the array.

Sometimes we want to make sure that our array can only contains certain things, such as text or numbers. We can do this by declaring an array as a specific type.

PipeHow:\Blog> [int[]]$MyArray = @(1)
PipeHow:\Blog> $MyArray.GetType().FullName
System.Int32[]

This can be done with any type! That means we can force results of commands to be saved to an appropriate type as well. Instead of storing the results of Get-Service in an array of objects we specify the type of our array as ServiceController[].

PipeHow:\Blog> [System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController[]]$ServiceArray = Get-Service
PipeHow:\Blog> $ServiceArray.GetType().FullName
System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController[]

Even arrays can be arrays, so called 2D (or even more multi-dimensional) arrays. Arrays of arrays can be useful when defining grid-like structures.

PipeHow:\Blog> ([Array[]]@(1)).GetType().FullName
System.Array[]

While that may look a little confusing, I’m simply wrapping the first array in parentheses before casting it to an Array[] instead of saving it to a variable.

Array Performance

There is a hefty downside to using arrays when it comes to adding or removing values from them. Arrays are internally declared with a fixed size, so every time you change the size of the array a completely new array is created which replaces the previous array. This means that if you have 100 computer names in an array, adding another one will in the background require PowerShell to create a new array and add the 101 entries to it, throwing away the old array and then giving you a new one.

Let’s create a simple function where we add a specified amount of elements to an array.

function New-LargeArray {
    param([int]$Size)
    $Array = @()
    for ($i = 0; $i -lt $Size; $i++) {
        $Array += $i
    }
    Write-Output $Array
}

We can demonstrate the performance impact by using Measure-Command on our new function.

PipeHow:\Blog> Measure-Command { $MyArray = New-LargeArray 5000 }

Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 0
Seconds           : 0
Milliseconds      : 449
Ticks             : 4496647
TotalDays         : 5,2044525462963E-06
TotalHours        : 0,000124906861111111
TotalMinutes      : 0,00749441166666667
TotalSeconds      : 0,4496647
TotalMilliseconds : 449,6647

One might think that it’s not too bad, it’s only half a second for 5000 iterations. If we increase it tenfold it would still only be like 4-5 seconds.

Well, not quite.

PipeHow:\Blog> Measure-Command { $MyArray = New-LargeArray 50000 }

Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 1
Seconds           : 12
Milliseconds      : 177
Ticks             : 721771485
TotalDays         : 0,000835383663194444
TotalHours        : 0,0200492079166667
TotalMinutes      : 1,202952475
TotalSeconds      : 72,1771485
TotalMilliseconds : 72177,1485

We can clearly see that arrays are not very efficient when growing in size, as adding an element to the array becomes exponentially slower as the size of the array increases.

So what are our options?

Avoid Large Arrays

There are a few ways for us to get around the problem, the easiest being not to create large arrays. This doesn’t seem like a realistic goal, though, as we’re eventually going to run into a situation where we need to gather a whole ton of users, computers or something else from a system and save them to a list of some sort.

Avoid Modifying Arrays

We can avoid adding to the array during every iteration. If we rewrite our function to save the output of our loop directly, we would save a ton of time as the array would only need to be created once.

function New-LargeArray {
    param([int]$Size)
    $Array = for ($i = 0; $i -lt $Size; $i++) {
        $i
    }
    Write-Output $Array
}

Let’s run it again!

PipeHow:\Blog> Measure-Command { $MyArray = New-LargeArray 50000 }

Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 0
Seconds           : 0
Milliseconds      : 12
Ticks             : 127618
TotalDays         : 1,47706018518519E-07
TotalHours        : 3,54494444444444E-06
TotalMinutes      : 0,000212696666666667
TotalSeconds      : 0,0127618
TotalMilliseconds : 12,7618

From 1 minute and 12 seconds to 12 milliseconds, that’s quite the improvement! We’re still running the same logic and if we take a look at our array we can see that it works and still contains all the numbers that we added.

PipeHow:\Blog> $MyArray.Count
50000

Avoid Arrays

Another recommended way to not be affected by slowdowns when working with arrays, is not to work with arrays at all! We can use other collection types in .NET that grant us significant performance advantages over arrays, which we’ll take a look at next.

For more reading on arrays, check out Get-Help about_Arrays or the online version on docs.

I hope you learned something new, stay tuned for the next part in the series where we will look at alternatives to arrays!