This post is just about my time with PowerShell for the 2007 Winter Scripting Games. If you have no interest, I certainly won’t be upset if you skip this post. I’m posting only because this will mark my first exposure to PowerShell.

I’ve found my creativity stimulated quite a lot by these games. Also, since I’ve started doing these games, I think this group of 4 events were the easiest so far. The first few might have been easy, but they required more effort since those were my first looks at PowerShell at all. By the way, MoW is also posting his responses and I must say, his code is far more elegant and experienced than mine. It’s awesome!

Beginner Event 7 involves taking a bit of code that throws an error, and manage that error. First, prevent the ugly error from displaying to the user, and then also handle the error later. This is a good Beginner topic and one of those things that often gets overlooked but is very necessary for good scripting and coding: error handling.

$error.clear()
$erroractionpreference = “SilentlyContinue”

######## START UNCHANGED CODE #########

$a = 5
$b = 6
$c = “seven”
$d = 8

$x = $a + $b
$x = $x + $c
$x = $x + $d

$x

######## END UNCHANGED CODE #########

if ($error.Count -gt 0)
{ Write-Host “An error has occurred.” }

# This would display the errors, but not required
# for ($i=0;$i -lt $error.Count;$i++)
# { $error[$i] }

Beginner Event 8 is a “simple” game of jacks. This is another excellent Beginner event in that it focuses on something rather basic but necessary: nested loops. This is simply about thinking through the logic of the problem, and then setting up counters and loops to achieve the answer.

$jacksingame = 10
$i = 1

do {
$jacks = 10
$bounces = 0

do { $bounces++;$bouncestotal++;$jacks -= ($i * 1); } until ($jacks -le 0)

$jackspickedup += 10
$i++
} until ($i -gt $jacksingame)

Write-host “Total jacks: $jackspickedup”
Write-host “Total pick-ups: $bouncestotal”

Advanced Event 7 wants a text file read, encrypted, and then also optionally decrypted using arguments when starting the script. Since I am still smarting from the rather nasty Beginner challenge to convert text to hex and back to text again, I decided to yoink that code, drop the hex part, and use the decimal values. Then increment the values by one before converting back into ASCII. Instant, if weak, encryption! (I also thought about using a simple cipher substitution or ROT13 Switch, but decided this was easier.)

if ($args[0] -eq “e”) {

$input = [string]::join([environment]::newline, (get-content -path Alice2.txt))
for($i=0;$i -lt $input.length;$i++)
{
[int[]]$a = $a + [int] $input[$i]
$a[$i] += 1
$e = $e + [char] $a[$i]
}

$encodedfile = New-Item -type file “Encoded.txt” -Force
Set-Content Encoded.txt $e

} elseif ($args[0] -eq “d”) {

if (Test-Path Encoded.txt) {

$input2 = [string]::join([environment]::newline, (get-content -path Encoded.txt))
for($i=0;$i -lt $input2.length;$i++)
{
[int[]]$x = $x + [int] $input2[$i]
$x[$i] -= 1
$y = $y + [char] $x[$i]
}

$y

} else { Write-Host “Encoded.txt not found. You probably need to use argument ‘e’ first to encode a file.”}

} else { Write-Host “Please provide an argument ‘e’ (to encode) or ‘d’ (to decode) ” }

Advanced Event 8 provided small pieces of code with the question: “Is this a valid piece of code?” Not too hard and kinda fun! I won’t post my answers here, since there’s nothing really novel in the answers.