Powershell Regex replace

Question

Team,

I have a file in Windows where the content is like the below:

460 ls

461 cd ..

462 ls

463 cd ubuntu/

464 ls

465 cd test/

466 ls

467 cd ..

468 openvpn

I want to remove all the numbers which are present in the beginning and get the actual content.

I have tried :

$var= Get-Content C:\Scripts\test.txt
$var.replace("/[4 6]/","");

$var.replace("/[4 6]/","");

($var.replace("4","")).Replace("6","")

But is it possible to get some regular expression solution for this.

@Wiktor Stribiżew Smaller : $var -replace '^[\s\d]+' (no need to add the second argument with -replace if it's a removal) — Manu
– Manu, Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 8:30

Wiktor Stribiżew · Accepted Answer · 2017-12-19 09:36:23Z

6

When processing a file line by line you may use the following pattern:

$var -replace '^[\s\d]+'

See the regex demo

When processing a whole file as one string you would need to use

$var -replace '(?m)^[\p{Zs}\t\d]+'

in order not to overflow across lines. See a .NET regex demo.

Details

^ - start of the input (when (?m) is used at the start of the pattern, ^ matches start of input and start of each line)
[\s\d]+ - one or more whitespaces (\s) or digits (\d)
[\p{Zs}\t] - matches any horizontal whitespace.

edited Dec 19, 2017 at 9:36

answered Dec 19, 2017 at 8:42

Wiktor Stribiżew

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2 Comments

Wiktor Stribiżew Over a year ago

@RanadipDutta: Sorry, I meant (?m)^[\p{Zs}\t\d]+ of course, mixed up \s and \d. I updated the answer.

Ranadip Dutta Over a year ago

Worked neatly. Both of them . Thank you

rufer7 · Accepted Answer · 2017-12-19 10:34:42Z

1

You can do so by using the following regular expression.

$result = $var -replace '^[\s]?\d+'

To update the file with the $result you can use the code below.

Set-Content -Value $result -Path C:\Scripts\test.txt

edited Dec 19, 2017 at 10:34

answered Dec 19, 2017 at 8:30

rufer7

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7 Comments

Ranadip Dutta Over a year ago

$var -replace '^\d+' is not working. It gave me the same output

rufer7 Over a year ago

@RanadipDutta when I execute $var -replace '^\d+' it returns the content without numbers as you asked for. To update the content of the file you have to assign the result to a variable like I did (i.e. result). Afterwards the content of the file has to be overriden by using the second statement I posted into my answer.

Ranadip Dutta Over a year ago

I did that. But that regex is not working. That I tried even earlier also.

rufer7 Over a year ago

@RanadipDutta do your lines in the text file start with a space?

Ranadip Dutta Over a year ago

The reason why it is not working is because I have leading spaces which you are not covering. I have mentioned that in the question. It is working with '^[\s\d]+'

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