Replacing part of a matched regular expression

Question

I'm trying to parse some very badly delimited files and ultimately change them to a CSV. I'm looking to match on number, whitespace, and then letter, and replace the whitespace with a comma.

For example If I had the line '08:34:45 home' I'd like it to recognize the '5 h' and make it '08:34:45,home'. I understand why what I have below isn't working correctly, but can someone explain how to tell Powershell that I want to keep the \d and the \D?

Get-Content -path C:\file.txt |

ForEach-Object {$_ -replace "(\d\s\D)",','}

Figured it out: ForEach-Object {$_ -replace "(\d)\s(\D)",'$1,$2'} — user2361820
– user2361820, Commented Oct 22, 2014 at 20:33

TessellatingHeckler · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-22 20:33:08Z

2

What you put in parentheses ( ) is captured by the regular expression, and you can access it with $1 for the first set, $2 for the second set, etc.

so you could try two capture groups:

$_ -replace '(\d)\s(\D)', '$1,$2'

See also: http://www.powershelladmin.com/wiki/Powershell_regular_expressions#Example_-_Replace_With_Captures for more details.

answered Oct 22, 2014 at 20:33

TessellatingHeckler

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