How to split a string and get the nth substring in Windows Powershell command line?

Question

How to split a string by spaces in a Windows batch file? didn't work for me.

I issue a Windows command to list the session ID of the logged in user, like this

PS C:\> $id = (quser /server:'ServerName' | Where-Object { $_ -match 'User' })
PS C:\> echo $id
User         console       4  Active none    6/13/1023 9:00 AM

How can I get the session id "4" from the output? I tried

PS C:\> $id = (quser /server:'ServerName' | Where-Object { $_ -match 'User' }).split(' ')[2]

but $id is just a blank string.

TIA

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 13 '23 at 18:40

With hard-coded

$id = 'User         console       4  Active none    6/13/1023 9:00 AM'

First, check all split syntax variants:

$id.Split

OverloadDefinitions
-------------------
string[] Split(Params char[] separator)
string[] Split(char[] separator, int count)
string[] Split(char[] separator, System.StringSplitOptions options)
string[] Split(char[] separator, int count, System.StringSplitOptions options)
string[] Split(string[] separator, System.StringSplitOptions options)
string[] Split(string[] separator, int count, System.StringSplitOptions options)

Then, use

$id.Split(' ', [System.StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries)

User
console
4
Active
none
6/13/1023
9:00
AM

Without additional parameters, $id.Split(' ').Count gives 26 while
$id.Split(' ', [System.StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries).Count -> 8

Thanks, this worked like a charm. – Chris F Jun 13 '23 at 18:46 — Chris F, Jun 13 '23 at 18:46

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 13 '23 at 18:07

in my opinion, in Windows cmd, you can use the FOR /F command to split a string and get the nth token (substring). Below is an example:

Suppose you have the following string: "This is a test string" and you want to get the 3rd word (which is "a" in this case). You could do:

@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
set str="This is a test string"
for /f "tokens=3 delims= " %%a in ("%str%") do set nth_word=%%a
echo !nth_word!

In this script, tokens=3 specifies to get the third word, delims= sets the delimiter to a space (which is the separator in this case), %%a is the variable that will hold the value of the third word, "%str%" is the string to split, set nth_word=%%a sets the value of %%a to the variable nth_word, and echo !nth_word! prints out the value of nth_word.

Thanks, but I tagged this as a `Powershell` question. – Chris F Jun 13 '23 at 18:45 — Chris F, Jun 13 '23 at 18:45

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 13 '23 at 20:22

A PowerShell-idiomatic solution is to use the unary form of the -splitoperator, which behaves as follows:

Leading and trailing whitespace is ignored.
Any nonempty run of whitespace - no matter how long - is treated as a single separator.

$id = (-split (quser /server:'ServerName' | Where-Object { $_ -match 'jdoe' }))[2]

^{Note: You'll probably want to make the -match operation more robust, such as with -match '\bjdoe\b'}

A simpler example:

-split '  one          two  three ' | ForEach-Object { "[$_]" }

Output (prints the resulting tokens enclosed in [...]):

[one]
[two]
[three]

Note that there are reasons to generally prefer the -split operator to the .Split() .NET string method, as discussed in this answer.

How to split a string and get the nth substring in Windows Powershell command line?

3 Answers3