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How to write a string of text in multiple colors in PowerShell

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One of the features about PowerShell that drew my attention away from VBScript many years ago was PowerShell’s ability to output information in multiple colors.  When you use Write-Host to display text on the screen, you also get to use the ForegroundColor and BackgroundColor parameters to change the font colors for that line of text.

What if you wanted to have a line of text with different colors?  To do this you will need to to use several Write-Host lines.  The problem with that is that you will have your text on multiple lines.  In the Help file for Write-Host, I noticed a parameter NoNewLine that will not put a return at the end of the text.  Your next Write-Host statement will appear on the same line.  Take a look at the code below and the output.

Write-host "This is some" -ForegroundColor Green -NoNewline
Write-Host "string" -ForegroundColor Red -BackgroundColor DarkRed -NoNewline
Write-Host "in different" -ForegroundColor Gray -BackgroundColor DarkYellow -NoNewline
Write-Host "Colors"

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Unknown said…
Thanks for posting this. -nonewline is what I needed!
July 24, 2014 at 11:34 AM
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