Rich formatting for PowerShell help

[updated] Ok, I just updated this with a new post on PoshCode. I posted the HtmlHelp module to PoshCode for generating HTML web pages based on the help for functions or cmdlets. It basically has one command: Get-HtmlHelp, which takes a couple of parameters now. The only mandatory parameter is the name of the command you want help for, in this case the html is output on the pipeline and can be redirected into a file.

Get-HtmlHelp Get-HtmlHelp | Set-Content Get-HtmlHelp.html
 

The markup generated is (I hope) reasonable and lightweight, with some simple css rules pre-applied. Feel free to customize the script to generate help however you like.

[new] Generating many at once

I forgot to mention the other parameters on Get-HtmlHelp. They’re pretty cool, because if you want to upload your help you can do so with this. Say you created a module, and you wanted to generate all the help into files for uploading. You want to set the -BaseUrl to the location you will upload them to, and then use the -OutputFolder parameter to generate an html file for each command into the specified folder:

Get-Command -Module ModuleName |
Get-HtmlHelp -BaseUrl http://HuddledMasses.org/HtmlHelp/ -OutputFolder ~\sites\HuddledMasses\HtmlHelp\
 

Now you can just take those files and upload them to the right spot on your website. I actually have some scripts which I can wrap around this to post the help to a wiki, but you’re just going to have to wait for that until the next time I get inspired to work on help …

Show-Help

I did include a little function in the comments and in the help for Get-HtmlHelp which uses ShowUI to display the rich formatted help in a popup window:

function Show-Help {
[CmdletBinding()]
param([String]$Name)  
   Window { WebBrowser -Name wb } -On_Loaded {
      $wb.NavigateToString((Get-HtmlHelp $Name))
      $this.Title = "Get-Help $Name"
   } -Show
}
 

So anyway, enough of that. When you run it, it looks like this (click for the full screenshot):

Click to see full screen-shot

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4 thoughts on “Rich formatting for PowerShell help”

  1. Vern_Anderson

    What about using this?

    Get-Help [[-Name] ] -Online

    Example:
    Get-Help Get-Process -Online

    1. Joel 'Jaykul' Bennett Post author

      Yeah Vern, that’s great if you’re dealing with cmdlets that have their help published online already, but if you’re authoring functions or working with other people’s scripts …

  3. Pingback: Dew Drop – January 29, 2012 (#1,253) | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew

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