How to insert a soft hyphen

Question

I would like to insert a soft hyphen between every letter in a word using powershell. for example here is some text:

Thisisatest => T-h-i-s-i-s-a-t-e-s-t

- is a soft hyphen. How might i do this in powershell?

I kind of thought that `-` was just a hyphen. What would be a **hard** hyphen? — Yuck, Feb 06 '12 at 19:10
@Yuck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_hyphen - and what Luke101 is doing is actually a hard hyphen, not a soft one. A hard hyphen stays with the text no matter what, as in mother-in-law. — Lunivore, Feb 06 '12 at 19:13
A soft hyphen would be ‘’. You probably won’t see it in a browser, but if you copy-and-paste my previous sentence to Notepad, it will automagically appear. If you’re on Windows, you might be able to create it by typing Alt+0173. — Douglas, Feb 06 '12 at 19:15
Here is a good link to look at in regards to Scripting with PowerShell.. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/scriptcenter/dd742419 — MethodMan, Feb 06 '12 at 19:16

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:11

6

Using .NET methods a little more than canonical PowerShell code, you can write

$word = "Thisisatest"
[System.String]::Join("-", $word.ToCharArray())

and Powershell outputs "T-h-i-s-i-s-a-t-e-s-t"

EDIT: For a true soft hyphen, and using this answer on Unicode in PowerShell, I would change the second line to

[System.String]::Join([char] 0x00AD, $word.ToCharArray())

edited May 23 '17 at 12:11

Community

answered Feb 06 '12 at 19:10

Adam Mihalcin

That's odd. On my box (Windows 7, PowerShell 2.0), I get the correct string output – Adam Mihalcin Feb 06 '12 at 19:35
ouch! same box! how debug this now?? – CB. Feb 06 '12 at 19:36
Which of the two posted lines are you using? The one with "-", or the one with [char] 0x00AD? – Adam Mihalcin Feb 06 '12 at 19:42
Try the line: `[System.String]::Join("-", @('T', 'h', 'i', 's'))` The `@` explicitly creates an array. – Adam Mihalcin Feb 06 '12 at 19:44
How about `$a = $word.ToCharArray()` followed by `[System.String]::Join("-", $a)`? – Adam Mihalcin Feb 06 '12 at 19:49
vs2010? I think you have something else going on to cause the weird output. In plain PowerShell you shouldn't get that result at all. – JasonMArcher Feb 14 '12 at 17:00

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 06 '12 at 20:27

6

You can use the PowerShell-friendly -join operator to do this:

"Thisisatest".ToCharArray() -join '-'

Look at the PowerShell Technet help for more information about the -join PowerShell operator.

answered Feb 06 '12 at 20:27

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 06 '12 at 19:10

2

There is a great article on splitting and joining strings in PowerShell here.

You may also find that the string.ToCharacterArray method is useful, as mentioned here.

answered Feb 06 '12 at 19:10

Lunivore

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 06 '12 at 23:49

Personally, I think you should avoid using .NET classes and methods unless there is no "native" PowerShell cmdlet or operator.

4 Answers4