POWERSHELL: making a literal string out of a expanded string

Question

I have a string that I build from a couple sources to do matching with later, the short of my code so far is:

$temp = "some\good"
if("some text" -match $temp)

My representation of $temp is simple but actually it is built, this is an example of how it can get built, so no, in this case changing " for ' to pass a literal to $temp won't work. If I hard code the if to use a literal string version of $temp, it works so its a matter of converting the value in $temp to a literal string.

I get the following error when I run my code: parsing "some\good" - Unrecognized escape sequence \g. At [not important] + if($temp2 -match $temp) + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : OperationStopped: (:) [], ArgumentException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : System.ArgumentException

AdamL · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-03 17:55:22Z

1

"Converting to literal string" won't help you here. String is a string, it only matters how it's being used, i.e. if the content is being interpreted in some way.

-match operates on regex, and that's it, you can't change that, you'd have to escape every all characters that have a meaning in regex. But you can use select-string instead, which has a switch for simple matching:

$text = "some text"
$patt = "some\good"
if (($text | Select-String -SimpleMatch -Pattern $patt | Measure-Object).count -gt 0) {
    Write-Host "match"
} else {
    Write-Host "nomatch"
}

answered Jun 3, 2014 at 17:55

AdamL

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1 Comment

LuckyFalkor84 Over a year ago

i had to check to make the variable i piped in wasn't a $null or empty, otherwise that hit the spot right on, thanks.

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