Issues replacing new line in PowerShell script

Question

I have a CSV file which has the following for example:

data1,data2,data3,data4,data5
,,,,,
data6,data7,data8,data9,data0

New lines are CRLF (`r`n) as viewed in Notepad++.

I have this in my PowerShell script to remove the line with all commas:

(Get-Content $csvPath) | Foreach-Object {$_ -replace ",,,,,`r`n", ""} | Set-Content $csvPath2

The script will not detect the returns. Even if I remove the commas and just have `r`n. However, I can replace the commas with `r`n without issues.

How can I remove that entire line of commas so that it appears as below?

data1,data2,data3,data4,data5
data6,data7,data8,data9,data0

Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-29 20:33:19Z

3

Use:

$lines = get-content C:\temp\test.txt | ?{$_ -notlike ",,,,*"}
$lines.count

Here the file test.txt contains:

data1,data2,data3,data4,data5
,,,,
data6,data7,data8,data9,data0

The output is:

data1,data2,data3,data4,data5
data6,data7,data8,data9,data0

edited May 29, 2017 at 20:33

Peter Mortensen

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answered Nov 22, 2013 at 20:00

Knows Not Much

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2 Comments

KevinD Over a year ago

Knows Not Much is correct. The reason why your original attempt wasn't working is that by default, Get-Content returns an array of strings, with the delimiter being a line break. So when you pipe it to ForEach-Object, none of the individual lines will have a line break in it. Alternately, if you really want to use the -replace method, add the -Raw parameter to the Get-Content cmdlet (or use -ReadCount 0 if you're on PowerShell 2 or lower).

Ben Over a year ago

Thank you both very much. The solution from Knows Not Much worked. And @KevinD thank you for the explanation. It makes sense as to why it was not working. I appreciate your assistance!

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