Stripping Data From a String In Powershell

Question

I'm pulling the hostnames from all computers in an AD domain and the current command formats it in url form with the hostname at the end. I just need the hostnames so I'd like to strip everything to the left of the last forward slash.

(([adsi]"WinNT://$((Get-WMIObject Win32_ComputerSystem).Domain)").Children).Where({$_.schemaclassname -eq 'computer'}) | %{ $_.Path }

It's outputting as it should, I just happen to just need the hostname, so instead of WinNT://subdomain.somedomain.local/hostname I just got hostname which I would then redirect to an output file.

Answer 1

You can use the -Split operator to help retrieve the data:

"WinNT://subdomain.somedomain.local/hostname" -Split "/" | Select-Object -Last 1

-Split "/" separates the value into an array of substrings using / as a delimiter. You can access the resulting parts using array indexes or Select-Object. Since you want the last value, you could alternatively access [-1] index of the resulting array (("WinNT://subdomain.somedomain.local/hostname" -Split "/")[-1]).

See About Split for more information and examples.

Answer 2

Just posting another option, and something else that may be useful. You can also split strings by their last index, which is the last time a character appears in it. From there you can use the Substring method to select the remainder of the string.

$lio = "WinNT://subdomain.somedomain.local/hostname".LastIndexOf('/')
"WinNT://subdomain.somedomain.local/hostname".Substring($lin + 1) # +1 to not include the slash

You can see all the methods for a string here

For things like this, I would also suggest looking at the ActiveDirectory module. You can run Get-ADComputer and select specific fields really easily.