The Invoke-WebRequest PowerShell commandlet is great if you want to get and work with some web page’s output without installing any extra tools like wget.exe for example. If you’re planning to do some text parsing on a web page anyway, PowerShell is an excellent option, so why not go full PS mode?
Unfortunately the command has some drawbacks causing it to be a lot slower than it should be if you just want plain text and it’s response parsing can even cause it to lock up and not return a result at all.

So here’s some pro-tips for parsing the output using PowerShell fast and effectively:

1. Use basic parsing

The commandlet does some DOM parsing by default using Internet Explorer. This takes time and sometimes fails too, so if you want to skip this bit and make things faster, simply add the command-line switch UseBasicParsing:

$r = Invoke-WebRequest https://n3wjack.net -UseBasicParsing

2. Split html in lines

Parsing text in PS is easy, but it’s even easier if the result is formatted like a text file with multiple lines instead of the full HTML in a single string. If you get the Content property from your webpage, you can split it up into separate lines by splitting on the newline character:

(Invoke-WebRequest https://n3wjack.net -UseBasicParsing).Content -split "`n"

Or, if you also want the HTTP header info to be included in the result, use RawContent instead:

(Invoke-WebRequest https://n3wjack.net -UseBasicParsing).RawContent -split "`n"

This can be really handy if you want to automatically check if the right response headers are set.
But you can also use the Headers collection on the result object, which is even easier.

3. Disable download progress meter shizzle to download large files (or always to speed things up)

That download progress bar is a nice visual and all when you’re using Invoke-WebRequest to download some large binaries and want to see it’s progress, but it significantly slows things down too. Set the $progressPreference variable and you’ll see your scripts download those files a lot faster.
The larger the files (like big as log files, images, video’s etc) the more this matters I’ve noticed.

$progressPreference = 'silentlyContinue'
invoke-webrequest $logurl -outfile .\logfile.log -UseBasicParsing
$progressPreference = 'Continue'

Be sure to reactivate this setting afterwards, because this affects any commandlet using that progress-bar feature.

4. No redirects please.

Invoke-WebRequest automatically follows an HTTP redirect (301/302) so you end up with the page you where looking for in the most cases.
If you want to test if a URL is properly redirected (or not redirected) this just makes things harder. In that case you can turn off redirects by using the MaximumRedirection parameter and setting it to 0

When you get a URL that returns a 301 when doing this, the command will throw an exception saying the maximum redirection counts has been exceeded. This makes this case easier to test.
The result object will also contain the redirect StatusCode.

$r = Invoke-WebRequest http://n3wjack.net -MaximumRedirection 0

5. Use the PowerShell result object

It’s overkill in some cases, but in others this is pure win. The result object contains some really handy bits of the webpage, making a lot of tricky text and regex parsing obsolete.
It’s a piece of cake to parse all images linked from a page using the Image collection. Want to parse all outgoing links on a page? Use the Links collection. There’s also a StatusCode, a Headers collection a Forms and Inputfield collection for form parsing and more.
Check out what’s available using Get-Members:

Invoke-WebRequest https://n3wjack.net | get-members

4. If all else fails, use wget.exe

Yep. Sometimes Invoke-WebRequest simply doesn’t cut it. I’ve seen it hang on some complex pages trying to parse it and failing miserably.
In that case you get fetch the page using the GNU WGet tool, download the page as a text file and then parse that.
You have to call wget by adding the exe extension part otherwise you’ll be triggering the PowerShell alias for Invoke-WebRequest again.

# Install WGet with Chocolatey
choco install wget

# Get the page and save it as a text file
wget.exe https://n3wjack.net -O nj.html
# Read the file and parse it.
get-content nj.html | % { # parsing code goes here }

A powerful pattern in software engineering is where you pass in a function or an object to another, which executes this given one dynamically. This allows you to extend behavior of code without having to edit that code. It’s known as the Strategy Pattern and allows for nice, clean and decoupled code.

In Powershell you can do this by passing a function as an argument to another function. When I tried to do this, I found out this wasn’t as trivial as I thought it would be, so here’s the nitty gritty on to work that magical extend-ability pattern.

Basically you want to do something like passing in a function which processes a single item in a loop controlled by another piece of code. Something like:

function Print-Number($number)
{
    echo "Number is $number"
}

function Do-Loop($function)
{
    $numbers = 1..10
    foreach ($number in $numbers)
    {
        # Here we should call $function and pass in $number
    }    
}

# Call Do-Loop with the PrintNumber function as a parameter here.

I ran into 2 problems here.

1. How do I pass in a function as a reference to another one?
2. How do I call one of those function blocks from the function that receives it?

First things first. The syntax for passing in a function inline looks like this:

Do-Loop ${function:Print-Number}

Note the function: prefix there. It’s the magic bit. This accesses the function object’s script block without executing it.
You can also list all functions available in your PowerShell session like this:

ls function:

If you want to pass in a script block like an anonymous lamba C# style, without defining a function first, you can do this:

Do-Loop { param($content) write-host $content }

Want to reuse that function a few times and store it in a variable? No problemo, just do this:

$function = { param($content) write-host $content }
Do-Loop $function
Do-SomethingElse $function

That pretty much covers all the options for problem number 1.
So now on the second problem: calling that passed in function or script block inside our host function.

Let’s say we want to call that function from a loop. To call the function you need to use the Invoke-Command commandlet and pass in the argument using the ArgumentList parameter like this:

foreach ($number in $numbers)
{
    Invoke-Command $function -ArgumentList $number
}

Pretty simple right?
The argument list expects an array as it’s value. So if you want to pass in 2 parameters like a number and a message text that would look something like this:

Invoke-Command $function -ArgumentList $number, $message

Putting it all together, here’s the working sample code:

function Print-Number($number)
{
    echo "Number is $number"
}

function Do-Loop($function)
{
    $numbers = 1..3
    foreach ($number in $numbers)
    {
        Invoke-Command $function -ArgumentList $number
    }    
}

Do-Loop ${function:\Print-Number}

Because of this array-as-a-parameter thing however I did run into a little snag for my actual code.
What if the first and only parameter is an array in itself? How do make it clear to the Invoke-Command commandlet that the array is a single parameter, not a list of parameters to pass into the function?

In my case I was passing in the content of a text file which is an array of strings. My first argument ended up being the first string of that array and I was lacking the rest of the file’s lines.

$array = Get-Content .\somefile.txt
Invoke-Command $function -ArgumentList $array # ?????

Again, there’s a little trick to that which I found on Stack Overflow. The syntax to pass in an array as a parameter is:

Invoke-Command $function -ArgumentList (,data)

The last bit seems to work by creating an array (that comma) where the first element is nothing and the second is our array.
Apparently the first element is then skipped and our second is passed in as the required array parameter.
A silly example to demonstrate this:

function Enhance($lines)
{
    $lines | % { "  > $_" }
}

function Do-It($function)
{
    $content = get-content .\awesome.txt
    Invoke-Command $function -ArgumentList (,$content)
}

Do-It ${function:\Enhance}