Powershell - Creating Excel Workbook - Getting "Insufficient memory to continue the execution of the program" - excel

Question

I'm trying to create an Excel workbook, then populate the cells with data found from searching many txt files.
I read a file and extract all comments AFTER I find "IDENTIFICATION DIVISION" and BEFORE I find "ENVIRONMENT DIVISION"
I then populate two cells in my excel workbook. cell one if the file and cell two is the comments extracted.
I have 256GB of memory on the work server. less than %5 is being used before Powershell throws the memory error.
Can anyone see where I'm going wrong?
Thanks,
-Ron
$excel = New-Object -ComObject excel.application
$excel.visible = $False
$workbook = $excel.Workbooks.Add()
$diskSpacewksht= $workbook.Worksheets.Item(1)
$diskSpacewksht.Name = "XXXXX_Desc"
$col1=1
$diskSpacewksht.Cells.Item(1,1) = 'Program'
$diskSpacewksht.Cells.Item(1,2) = 'Description'
$CBLFileList = Get-ChildItem -Path 'C:\XXXXX\XXXXX' -Filter '*.cbl' -File -Recurse
$Flowerbox = #()
ForEach($CBLFile in $CBLFileList) {
$treat = $false
Write-Host "Processing ... $CBLFile" -foregroundcolor green
Get-content -Path $CBLFile.FullName |
ForEach-Object {
if ($_ -match 'IDENTIFICATION DIVISION') {
# Write-Host "Match IDENTIFICATION DIVISION" -foregroundcolor green
$treat = $true
}
if ($_ -match 'ENVIRONMENT DIVISION') {
# Write-Host "Match ENVIRONMENT DIVISION" -foregroundcolor green
$col1++
$diskSpacewksht.Cells.Item($col1,1) = $CBLFile.Name
$diskSpacewksht.Cells.Item($col1,2) = [String]$Flowerbox
$Flowerbox = #()
continue
}
if ($treat) {
if ($_ -match '\*(.{62})') {
Foreach-Object {$Flowerbox += $matches[1] + "`r`n"}
$treat = $false
}
}
}
}
$excel.DisplayAlerts = 'False'
$ext=".xlsx"
$path="C:\Desc.txt"
$workbook.SaveAs($path)
$workbook.Close
$excel.DisplayAlerts = 'False'
$excel.Quit()

Answer 1

Not knowing what the contents of the .CBL files could be, I would suggest not to try and do all of this using an Excel COM object, but create a CSV file instead to make things a lot easier.
When finished, you can simply open that csv file in Excel.
# create a List object to collect the 'flowerbox' strings in
$Flowerbox = [System.Collections.Generic.List[string]]::new()
$treat = $false
# get a list of the .cbl files and loop through. Collect all output in variable $result
$CBLFileList = Get-ChildItem -Path 'C:\XXXXX\XXXXX' -Filter '*.cbl' -File -Recurse
$result = foreach ($CBLFile in $CBLFileList) {
Write-Host "Processing ... $($CBLFile.FullName)" -ForegroundColor Green
# using switch -File is an extremely fast way of testing a file line by line.
# instead of '-Regex' you can also do '-WildCard', but then add asterikses around the strings
switch -Regex -File $CBLFile.FullName {
'IDENTIFICATION DIVISION' {
# start collecting Flowerbox lines from here
$treat = $true
}
'ENVIRONMENT DIVISION' {
# stop colecting Flowerbox lines and output what we already have
# output an object with the two properties you need
[PsCustomObject]#{
Program = $CBLFile.Name # or $CBLFile.FullName
Description = $Flowerbox -join [environment]::NewLine
}
$Flowerbox.Clear() # empty the list for the next run
$treat = $false
}
default {
# as I have no idea what these lines may look like, I have to
# assume your regex '\*(.{62})' is correct..
if ($treat -and ($_ -match '\*(.{62})')) {
$Flowerbox.Add($Matches[1])
}
}
}
}
# now you have everything in an array of PSObjects so you can save that as Csv
$result | Export-Csv -Path 'C:\Desc.csv' -UseCulture -NoTypeInformation
Parameter -UseCulture ensures you can double-click the file so it will open correctly in your Excel
You can also create an Excel file from this csv programmatically like:
$excel = New-Object -ComObject Excel.Application
$excel.Visible = $false
$workbook = $excel.Workbooks.Open('C:\Desc.csv')
$worksheet = $workbook.Worksheets.Item(1)
$worksheet.Name = "XXXXX_Desc"
# save as .xlsx
# 51 ==> [Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.XlFileFormat]::xlWorkbookDefault
# see: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/excel.xlfileformat
$workbook.SaveAs('C:\Desc.xlsx', 51)
# quit Excel and remove all used COM objects from memory
$excel.Quit()
$null = [System.Runtime.Interopservices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject($worksheet)
$null = [System.Runtime.Interopservices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject($workbook)
$null = [System.Runtime.Interopservices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject($excel)
[System.GC]::Collect()
[System.GC]::WaitForPendingFinalizers()