Here is a great tip I thought of on-the-fly. Say you need to make a fixed width file for something that needs to get out right away. Here is what you do: convert to char!
Concatenate all the fields together and converting all of the data to the char data type will allow you to save the results in a perfect fixed width / ragged right format.
Simple and fast!
Here is something that works incredibly well.
This is a quick description enter the file names you wish to use. Powershell then reads in all the data and creates a new file by joining all the elements in the char array to a string. It then takes the row and ends it in a carriage return / line feed. Finally it saves the file.
$fileName = c:\file.txt
$newFileName = c:\newfile.txt
$newFile = “”
Get-Content -Path $filename | ForEach-Object{$newFile += [string]::Join(“”,$_[0..149] + $_[154..777]) + “`r`n”}
$newfile > $newFileName
Refactoring Self 