Write-Information With Colours

When learning PowerShell, one of the first things you learn is that the command Write-Host is super useful. It lets you write messages to the console and allows you to specify optional foreground and background colors.

However, the very next thing you learn is:

Don’t use Write-Host - it can’t be suppressed or redirected.

So how do you write messages to the user?

Write-Information

In PowerShell 5, a new stream was introduced. PowerShell already had Verbose, Debug, Warning, Error, and Output streams, but it was now time to add an Information stream. Ed Wilson has a great write-up on its introduction here.

Why?

One of the key problems with Write-Host is that it goes directly to the host implementation. There it is consumed and effectively ‘lost’ to the user. By introducing Write-Information and the new stream, users can now redirect the stream and modify its impact using $InformationPreference and the common parameter -InformationAction for cmdlets.

With the new stream available, the implementation of Write-Host was then changed to redirect to Write-Information. To make the changes non-breaking the -InformationAction is always treated as Continue to ensure that existing uses of Write-Host continue to display as they did in previous versions of PowerShell.

This means:

If a cmdlet calls Write-Host the user can never hide that message from the console.

For example, all of these messages are still displayed even when attempting to use $InformationPreference and -InformationAction

But what about colours?

However, Write-Host supports -ForegroundColor and -BackgroundColor but Write-Information does not. People continue to use Write-Host and in doing so they continue to prevent the user from using $InformationPreference and -InformationAction as intended.

How is Write-Host implemented?

So how can we use the information stream and also have colours? Let’s take a look at the source code to see how Write-Host is now implemented.

NOTE: This isn’t the actual Windows PowerShell version of the code, but by checking the PowerShell Core implementation we should get a handle on how things currently work as well as how things work in the future.

The full implementation of Write-Host can be seen here. We’re actually just interested in the implementation of ProcessRecord.

What we can see is the construction of a HostInformationMessage object containing the parameters from the cmdlet. This is then passed on to WriteInformation along with a tag of PSHOST.

Taking a look at the implementation for Write-Information we can see that the tags are checked to see if the the PSHOST tag is provided and a tag of FORWARDED is missing or the current information preference is Continue. In the event that this check is passed, the MessageData of the current record is tested as a HostInformationMessage and if found, the message is then decomposed and its values used to communicate to the host.

Before all of these checks, there is a call to CBhost.InternalUI.WriteInformationRecord(record); where (I assume…) the normal writing of the record occurs.

From this information we now understand:

• When calling Write-Host the parameters are packed up and passed to Write-Information as a HostInformationMessage
• Write-Information will process the parameters as a special type if
  • A tag of PSHOST exists and a tag of FORWARDED does not
  • or The current preference variable is Continue

We can therefore conclude:

Passing a HostInformationMessage with no PSHOST tag will ensure only the preference variable impacts visibility.

Write-InformationColored

Taking everything we’ve learnt so far, we can now build a function that will support user-specified colours when viewed in a console, but also honour the visibility of the information stream:

By using the new function, we get all the benefits of the information stream and its associated preference variable as well as the simple coloured output that Write-Host also supports.

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You can grab all the examples from this post here