In Atom, if I use Ctrl-F with regular expressions, it will highlight all the matches of the regular expression, for example
File:
aaa
b
ccc
d
e
f
gg
Query:
[a-z]{2,}
Highlighted text:
aaa
ccc
gg
But I haven't found a cmdlet to do this in PowerShell
Expected input/output:
$var = @"
aaa
b
ccc
d
e
f
gg
"@
$var -find "[a-z]{2,}"
#Output
aaa
ccc
gg
Is there a way I can do this?
What you are looking for is
$regex = [regex]'[a-z]{2,}'
$regex.Matches($var).value
As in the comments I suggested you look at Powershell using Regex finding a string within a string where the answer demonstrated the [regex]'s datatype .match method. Unfortunately, this only grabs the first result of a regex and is not meant for multiple results, however, matches will get multiple as it is the plural form of match:
.match:
# Define a regex query
$regex = [regex]'[a-z]{2,}'
# Define your variable
$var = @"
aaa
b
ccc
d
e
f
gg
"@
# Query $var
$regex.match($var)
#output
Groups : {0}
Success : True
Name : 0
Captures : {0}
Index : 0
Length : 3
Value : aaa
As you can see this only gets aaa and provides other data like what group it was in, if it succeeded, and other information.
However, if we do the same thing but with the matches method, it will get all 3 results:
$regex.matches($var)
#output
Groups : {0}
Success : True
Name : 0
Captures : {0}
Index : 0
Length : 3
Value : aaa
Groups : {0}
Success : True
Name : 0
Captures : {0}
Index : 6
Length : 3
Value : ccc
Groups : {0}
Success : True
Name : 0
Captures : {0}
Index : 16
Length : 2
Value : gg
Which shows information for all three results. But if we want to narrow down the results to just the values, we can grab the value tag of the variable like
$regex.Matches($var).value
#output
aaa
ccc
gg
Which is (I assume from your question) what you want.
You can use Select-String to get your desired output:
$var = @"
aaa
b
ccc
d
e
f
gg
"@
$var -split '\r\n' | Select-String -Pattern "[a-z]{2,}"
Output:
aaa
ccc
gg
