Powershell, replace DOT with SPACE

Question

This works:

$string = "This string, has a, lot, of commas in, it."
  $string -replace ',',''

Output: This string has a lot of commas in it.

But this doesn't work:

$string = "This string. has a. lot. of dots in. it."
  $string -replace '.',''

Output: blank.

Why?

Possible duplicate of [Powershell replacing periods](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14541980/powershell-replacing-periods) — Lance U. Matthews, Mar 28 '17 at 20:16

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 28 '17 at 19:49

7

-replace searches using regular expressions (regexp), and in regexps the dot is a special character. Escape it using '\', and it should work. See Get-Help about_Regular_Expressions.

answered Mar 28 '17 at 19:49

Jeff Zeitlin

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luke · Answer 2 · 2018-12-19T12:43:42.637

The first argument in -replace is a regular expression (but the second one is not)
'.' is a special char in regular expressions and means every single character
$string -replace '.', '' means: replace every single character with '' (blank char)
and in the result you get blank string
So in order to escape regular expression special char . and make it treated as a normal character you have to escape it using \
$string -replace '\.', ''
If you want to reuse your string later you have to rewrite it to a variable otherwise the result will be lost
$string = $string -replace '\.', ''

So it should be:

$string = "This string. has a. lot. of dots in. it."
$string = $string -replace '\.', ''

and then

echo $string

results in:

This string has a lot of dots in it

Powershell, replace DOT with SPACE

2 Answers2