How to preserve new line characters when performing a regex match in PowerShell

Asked Apr 17 '20 at 16:35

Active Apr 17 '20 at 16:40

Viewed 796 times

The goal is simple:

Take contents of text file
Search for pattern
Save search back to the file

For example, i want to find the first occurrence between # and ##. Following regex works perfectly (\#)(.*?)(?=\#{2}). It finds what I want. However, PowerShell removes all new line characters effectively changing the formatting. So, following input text

#
This
Is
My
Text
##

becomes this

# This Is My Text

How to preserve the formatting?

Here is my PowerShell script

param (
    [string]$filename
)

$content = Get-Content -Path $filename
$output = $filename

$regex = [Regex]::new('(\#)(.*?)(?=\#{2})')
$matches = $regex.Matches($content)
Set-Content -Path $output $Matches[0]

asked Apr 17 '20 at 16:35

Ingweland

1,073
1
13
25

`$content = Get-Content -Path $filename -Raw` – Wiktor Stribiżew Apr 17 '20 at 16:36
It stopped finding the match after I added -Raw – Ingweland Apr 17 '20 at 16:39
Because you now have a multiline string, so [use `(?s)`](https://stackoverflow.com/a/45981809/3832970) - `[Regex]::new('(?s)(#)(.*?)(?=#{2})')` – Wiktor Stribiżew Apr 17 '20 at 16:39
1

Finally! that was easy... i spent like an hour trying everything. You can post it as an answer – Ingweland Apr 17 '20 at 16:41
All duplicate links are at the top of the page. – Wiktor Stribiżew Apr 17 '20 at 16:42

How to preserve new line characters when performing a regex match in PowerShell

0 Answers0