Indent

Indent text. Requires Powershell 5.1+, which should be built into any remotely modern Windows distribution.

Find the source here.

I wrote this in Powershell because sed can quite literally cover all of its functionality on *nix at a faster speed, except the objects streaming part specific to the .NET-oriented design of Powershell. This utility is meant to bridge the cross-platform gap a bit, in the specific case of bulk indentation.

Note

Read the comment in the source file (Indent.psm1) for static documentation.

Installation

It is recommended that you run the following first to allow scripts to be run:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser

Or if you want this to apply to every user, execute below in an administrator Powershell instance:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope LocalMachine

Install as a module

This is considered a legacy method, but is compatible with all environments.

To skip confirmation prompts for all future installations:

Set-PSRepository -Name PSGallery -InstallationPolicy Trusted

Then,

Install-Module -Name Indent # user installation
# or
Install-Module -Name Indent -Scope AllUsers # system installation; needs elevation

To update the module:

Update-Module -Name Indent

Install as a resource

This method is faster and more modern, but requires Powershell 7.4+.

To skip confirmation prompts for all future installations:

Set-PSResourceRepository -Name PSGallery -Trusted

Then,

Install-PSResource -Name Indent # user installation
# or
Install-PSResource -Name Indent -Scope AllUsers # system installation; needs elevation

To update the resource:

Update-PSResource -Name Indent

Usage

To get help for this module dynamically, use the Get-Help Cmdlet, optionally using the -Online switch.

The snippet below demonstrates, in a Powershell instance, how one would use the module to process some text. It is self-contained.

Import-Module -Name Indent # Make the Indent function and IndentFilter filter available
Write-Output @"
w  
   
x
 y

z z 
"@ > a.txt
Get-Content a.txt | Indent -Count 3 -TrimInput > b.txt
# write each whitespace-only line in a.txt as an empty line and each other line indented by
# three spaces into b.txt
Get-Content b.txt | IndentFilter > a.txt
# Indent each non-empty line in b.txt by two spaces and output into a.txt
Get-Content b.txt # literal output (excluding pounds) below
#   w
#
#   x
#    y
#
#   z z
Get-Content a.txt # literal output (excluding pounds) below
#     w
#
#     x
#      y
#
#     z z