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I've recently broken into some of the subtler nuances of PowerShell, and noticed something I cannot avoid involving the return of a new line at the start of a string using this mundane function...

Function Why() { "" return "Well I tried." }

This returns "\r\nWell I tried".

Write-Host "Starting test." $theBigQuestion= Why Write-Host $theBigQuestion Write-Host "Ending test."

This will output the following: 

Starting test. Well I tried. Well I tried. Ending test.

Now, this appears PowerShell is concatenating one output with another. But... why? What makes it think that I wanted the blank line to be part of the return statement? I (perhaps erroneously) like to use lines like this as shorthand, or to examine variables more closely for debugging purposes.

Related: Function return value in PowerShell

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  • what is the "" doing in the function? that is what echoing the blank line \r\n Commented Jul 29, 2014 at 16:43
  • @bansi "" was originally echoing a blank line to the console. It's a bad habit of mine. I know the "what", but I'm trying to figure out the "why". Commented Jul 29, 2014 at 16:47
  • Which version of powershell is this? I do not see a blank line or "Well I tried." printed twice in 4.0. Commented Jul 29, 2014 at 16:57
  • @mikez This is PowerShell 2.0... which may be causing the problem. Commented Jul 29, 2014 at 17:00
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    get-help about_return. Anything that is not captured in a function will get returned. use write-host and you won't have this problem Commented Jul 29, 2014 at 17:40

2 Answers 2

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This function:

Function Why() { "" return "Well I tried." }

Is returning an array of two strings. The first string is an empty string and the second is "Well I tried.". When PowerShell displays an array of string it puts each string on a newline.

25> $r = why 26> $r.GetType() IsPublic IsSerial Name BaseType -------- -------- ---- -------- True True Object[] System.Array 27> $r[0].Length 0 28> $r[1] Well I tried.
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...and here I was thinking it was returning a string the entire time. Derp.... thank you.
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If you just want to have "Well I tried" to return, you can also use Out-Null or assign the unwanted return value to $null

Function Why() { Out-Null "" return "Well I tried." }

or 

Function Why() { $null = "" return "Well I tried." }

or 

Function Why() { "" > $null return "Well I tried." }
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