Exporting SharePoint List Items to a CSV File via Powershell

What?  A powershell script to export all lists from a web to csv files.

Why?  Doesn't SharePoint offer multiple way to move data?  Yes.  And they never quite seem to do what I want.  If I want to rebuild a development web after making schema changes to a list and I try to use any of the native SharePoint tools something always seems to go wrong.  If you want to share development data with other developers using the native tools, again good luck.  If you have multiple demonstrations and wish to install them on different farms and perhaps to different levels of the SharePoint product good luck.  Sometimes these things work, others times they just bomb.

Using a .csv file to achieve the same thing means you have just the data without any of the baggage that often comes with using SharePoint.

This script accepts 2 parameters, the web url and the output path for the csv files (you must manually create the output path if it does not exist).  It then get all lists and exports them to csv files where the names are the list title + .csv (yourListTitle.csv).

Here is the script:



Param(
 [Parameter(Mandatory=$True)]
 [string]$webUrl,
 [Parameter(Mandatory=$True)]
 [string]$outPath
)
$web = Get-SPWeb $webUrl
write-host ("Path: " + $outPath)
foreach($list in $web.Lists)
{
  $exportlist = $null
  $exportlist = @()
  $list.Items | foreach {
    $hash = $null
    $hash = @{}
    foreach($fld in $_.Fields ){
      Try {
        $hash.add($fld.Title, $_[$fld.Title])
      }
      Catch [System.Management.Automation.MethodInvocationException]
      {
        # Eating an error caused by duplicate column names.
      }
      Finally
      {
        #"End"
      }
    }
    write-host ("Exported: " + $_.Title)
    $obj = New-Object PSObject -Property $hash #@{
    $exportlist += $obj

  }
  $expath = $outPath + '\' + $list.Title + '.csv'
  $exportlist | Export-Csv -path $expath #$oPath

}