PowerShell v3 – New -in Operator @ Jonathan Medd's Blog

PowerShell v3 – New -in Operator

Posted on October 12th, 2012 Jonathan Medd 2 comments

Hidden away amongst some of the new language features in PowerShell v3 are two new operators: -in and -notin. Previously you could use -contains, say in an example like the following: does the variable $fruits contain the string ‘Apple’?
```
$fruits = 'Apple','Orange','Pear'
$fruits -contains 'Apple'
$fruits -contains 'Banana'
```
There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but in many examples for me it seemed to be the wrong way around from that I was naturally thinking: is the string ‘Apple’ in the variable $fruits?

With the addition of the -in operator it’s now possible to write it this way:
```
$fruits = 'Apple','Orange','Pear'
'Apple' -in $fruits
'Banana' -in $fruits
```
powershell powershell
2 responses to “PowerShell v3 – New -in Operator”
- Stephen Mills October 12th, 2012 at 15:33
  
  They did this so you could have -contains functionality when using the shortened where-object syntax. Although I agree that -in makes more sense to me.
  
  In V2 you would do this:
  dir | Where { ‘.ps1′, ‘.cmd’ -contains $_.Extension }
  
  In V3 you can do this:
  dir | Where Extension -in ‘.ps1′, ‘.cmd’
  
  because the first parameter has to be the property you are checking, -contains wouldn’t work.
- Jonathan Medd October 13th, 2012 at 17:41
  
  Absolutely. I prefer not to speak of this simplified syntax though
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