Extending the PowerShell range operator

The PowerShell range operator ‘..’ can be used to create lists of sequential numbers with an increment (or decrement) of one:

 1..5 -1..-5

This is quite handy. Wouldn’t it be even better if it would also support stepwise lists (FIRST, SECOND..LAST similar to Haskell where the step width is determined by the first and the second list entry), day, month and letter ranges? :

 monday..wednesday march..may #range of numbers from 2 to 15 with steps of 3 (5 - 2) 2:5..15 #range of numbers from 1 to 33 with steps of .2 (1.2 - 1) 1:1.2..33 #range of letters from a to z a..z #range of letters from Z to A Z..A #range of numbers from -2 to 1024 with steps of 6 (4 - -2) -2:4..1kb

At least I though it would be.
While PowerShell does not support something like language extensions in order to change the behavior of the range operator directly, it is possible to get this working (admittedly it feels a bit like a hack) by overriding the ~~‘PreCommandLookupAction’ event. The ‘PreCommandLookupAction’ event is triggered after the current line is parsed but before PowerShell attempts to find a matching command.~~
I’ve encountered timed out IntelliSense/tab completion issues with the custom ‘PreCommandLookupAction’ therefore, I’ve updated the solution to use the ‘CommandNotFoundAction’ instead. The CommandNotFoundAction is triggered if PowerShell cannot find a command (who would have thought)

 $ExecutionContext.SessionState.InvokeCommand.CommandNotFoundAction={	param($CommandName,$CommandLookupEventArgs)	#if the command consists of two dots with leading trailing words optionally containing (:,.) + leading -	if ($CommandName -match '^(-*\w+[:.]*)+\.\.(-*\w+)+$'){	$CommandLookupEventArgs.StopSearch = $true	#associate new command	$range = $CommandName.replace('get-','')	$CommandLookupEventArgs.CommandScriptBlock={	#no step specified	if ($range -notlike '*:*') {	#check for month name or day name range	$monthNames=(Get-Culture).DateTimeFormat.MonthNames	$dayNames=(Get-Culture).DateTimeFormat.DayNames	$enum=$null	if ($monthNames -contains $range.Split("..")[0]){$enum=$monthNames}	elseif ($dayNames -contains $range.Split("..")[0]){$enum=$dayNames}	if ($enum){	$start,$end=$range -split '\.{2}'	$start=$enum.ToUpper().IndexOf($start.ToUpper())	$end=$enum.ToUpper().IndexOf($end.ToUpper())	$change=1	if ($start -gt $end){ $change=-1 }	while($start -ne $end){	$enum[$start]	$start+=$change	}	$enum[$end]	return	}	#check for character range	if ([char]::IsLetter($range[0])){	[char[]][int[]]([char]$range[0]..[char]$range[-1])	return	}	Invoke-Expression $range	return	}	$range = $range.Split(':')	$step=$range[1].SubString(0,$range[1].IndexOf("..")) - $range[0]	#use invoke-expression to support kb,mb.. and scientific notation e.g. 4e6	[decimal]$start=Invoke-Expression $range[0]	[decimal]$end=Invoke-Expression ($range[1].SubString($range[1].LastIndexOf("..")+2))	$times=[Math]::Truncate(($end-$start)/$step)	$start	for($i=0;$i -lt $times ;$i++){	($start+=$step)	}	}.GetNewClosure()	} }

Adding the code to your profile will make the “extended” range operator version available in all PowerShell sessions.
I’ve also create a separate Get-Range function which can be downloaded from my Github repository.

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