One of the everyday use cases with PSWriteHTML is to create a simple view of PowerShell data in a table. While PowerShell comes with a built-in cmdlet ConvertTo-Html, it’s basic in its functionality. It makes an HTML representation of PowerShell data, but it brings no CSS, JavaScript, or other functionality. While for some use cases, it’s enough, the other times, you need to make an effort to make it usable.
out-htmlview
For the last few weeks I’m working on a small project, that should be released within next few weeks (it is open source so don’t worry – you’ll get to play with it). This project requires me to compare two or more objects and tell if those are equal and if those aren’t to what degree. Of course, PowerShell offers built-in functionality via Compare-Object command. It’s mighty but it leaves comparing differences, different properties to you. While there are probably other solutions that help users compare objects, I haven’t found anything that would meet my requirements. After I’ve written Compare-MultipleObjects function, I thought it could be interesting to implement visual comparison – you know human-readable – and I had the perfect place to apply it.