Store 1 Element in array

Question

Hi everyone I have a script to check to see if it can ping a list of IPs. If it cannot reach 1 it stores it in an array. The problem is if only 1 IP is stored in the array it treats each char as an element of that array. 
$psr = $PSScriptRoot
$a = Get-Content $psr\list.txt
$machines = @()
for($i=0;$i -lt $a.length;$i++){
$key = $a[$i]
$info = @()
$info = -split $key
$machines = $info[0]
#Start-Sleep -Seconds 60
for($j=0;$j -lt $machines.length;$j++){
if(!(Test-Connection -ComputerName $machines[$j] -BufferSize 16 -Count 1 -ea 0 -quiet)){
Write-Host $machines[$j]
}else{
Write-Host "All machines are awake"
It happens in the second for loop list is just a snippet of the code. How can I write to host the full IP as 1 element?
Thanks

Answer 1

You have a couple of options.  You can use a foreach loop instead of a for loop, which is a special case in PowerShell.  Even though strings are Enumerable, PowerShell will not enumerate over the characters in the string unless you explicitly call
its GetEnumerator() method.  Alternatively, you can put the @() operator around the call to Get-Content.  This is the array subexpression operator, and essentially tells PowerShell to convert the result to a single-element array if it is not
already an array.
$a = @(Get-Content $psr\list.txt)
# or
foreach ($key in $a)
$info = -split $key
$machines = $info[0]
It looks like you may run into a similar issue in your second loop.  In general, foreach loops are preferred, unless you need to modify the contents of the array within the loop body or do some more complex stepping logic.