Script to read contents of media files attached to Sitecore media library items

Ever wondered how can we read contents of files uploaded to media library without rendering them? Recently, we needed a PowerShell script to read the content of our SVGs and create a list of SVGs which contained a pattern in them. After a little research, I came up with this script - 

$item =Get-Item -Path "/sitecore/media library/<filepath here>"

$mediaItem = New-Object 'Sitecore.Data.Items.MediaItem' $item;

$blobField = $mediaItem.InnerItem.Fields["blob"]

if($blobField){

        $blobStream = $blobField.GetBlobStream()

        if($blobStream){

            try    

            {

                $contents = New-Object byte[] $blobStream.Length

                $blobStream.Read($contents, 0, $blobStream.Length) | Out-Null

            } 

            finally 

            {

                    $blobStream.Close()    

            }

            $fileText = ([System.Text.Encoding]::Default.GetString($contents))

        }

}

In the above script, $fileText will contain the contents of the file. 

Note: If a file's content is correctly rendered in notepad++ as in snapshot below, then you will be able to read and process the contents using this script. 

And if a file's content is not rendered correctly in notepad++, then you may need additional/alternate logics to convert the byte[] read from SqlServerStream returned by blob field that contains media as attachment into a readable format. This script shall be a good starting point in such cases to fetch the SqlServerStream from the blobfield. 

Hope it helps you! Thanks for reading!!