Getting the count of a hashtable that only has one key/value in it

Question

I have a foreach loop that currently puts three entries in my hashtable:

$result = foreach($key in $serverSpace.Keys){
    if($serverSpace[$key] -lt 80){
        [pscustomobject]@{
            Server = $key
            Space = $serverSpace[$key]}}}

When I use

$result.count

I get 3 as expected. I changed the foreach loop to exlude the entries less than or equal to one using

$result = foreach($key in $serverSpace.Keys){
    if($serverSpace[$key] -lt 80 -and $serverSpace[$key] -gt 1){
        [pscustomobject]@{
            Server = $key
            Space = $serverSpace[$key]}}}

$result.count should have 1 as its output but it doesn't recognize .count as a suggested command and $result.count doesn't output anything anymore. I'm assuming when theres only one entry in the hash table it won't allow a count? Not sure whats going on but my conditions for my script are dependent on the count of $result. Any help would be appreciated.

[1] that PSCO is NOT a hashtable. [grin] [2] if you want a single object to have a .Count property, you need to make that object into a collection. the easiest way is to prefix the $Var name with [array]. — Lee_Dailey
– Lee_Dailey, Commented Jul 12, 2021 at 15:29
Terminology note: What your foreach loop is returning is one or more custom objects ([pscustomobject] instances), not hashtables. — mklement0
– mklement0, Commented Jul 13, 2021 at 2:37

Tabiat1739 · Accepted Answer · 2021-07-12 15:33:55Z

2

$result is not a hashtable so I prefixed it with @($result).count. Thank you to @Theo and @Lee_Dailey

answered Jul 12, 2021 at 15:33

Tabiat1739

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mklement0 · Accepted Answer · 2025-01-27 22:56:56Z

What you're seeing is a bug in Windows PowerShell (as of the latest and final version, 5.1), which has since been corrected in PowerShell (Core) 7 - see GitHub issue #3671 for the original bug report.

That is, since v3 all objects should have an intrinsic .Count property, not just collections, in the interest of unified treatment of scalars and collections - see this answer for more information.

The workaround for Windows PowerShell is indeed to force a value to be an array via @(...), the array-subexpression operator, which is guaranteed to have a .Count property, as shown in your answer, but it shouldn't be necessary and indeed isn't anymore in PowerShell (Core) 7.

# !! Due to a BUG, this outputs $null in *Windows PowerShell*,
# !! but correctly outputs 1 in PowerShell (Core) 7.
([pscustomobject] @{}).Count

# WORKAROUND for Windows PowerShell, effective in *both* editions.
# However, note that this comes at a cost: if what is inside @(...)
# is already a collection (enumerable), it will be
# *enumerated and collected in a new array*, which is inefficient.
@([pscustomobject] @{}).Count

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