Extracting substring in powershell using regex

Question

I have a string in excel that I need to extract a substring from

This is an example of the string:

<\Text Name="Text5"><TextValue>Hostname:   hostnamehere</TextValue>

I'm new to regex and powershell, but I'm trying to find a way to extract the "hostname here" portion of the string. It's variable length, so indexing won't be reliable.

I had to fix the original question by cancelling out the tags. The Split function isolates the hostname but leaves the trailing tag. I tried splitting it again but I'm getting errors in console (still new to PS, I'm likely using bad parameters) — amatthew382
– amatthew382, Commented Jun 17, 2019 at 18:35

Lee_Dailey · Accepted Answer · 2019-06-17 18:38:38Z

1

since you changed the sample, the comment code i posted won't work. [grin] this will, tho ...

$InStuff = '<\Text Name="Text5"><TextValue>Hostname:   hostnamehere</TextValue>'

$InStuff.Split(':')[-1].Split('<')[0].Trim()

output = hostnamehere

if you have a set of sample strings, then you likely otta post them so the code can be arranged to handle the needed variants.

answered Jun 17, 2019 at 18:38

Lee_Dailey

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2 Comments

amatthew382 Over a year ago

Can you provide a quick explanation for me on how how trim() works?

Lee_Dailey Over a year ago

when there is no text in the parens, the .Trim() string method removes whitespace at both ends of the string. there are also .TrimEnd() and .TrimStart() for when you want to be more targeted. finally, they all trim characters [not strings] from the target until there are none left to trim. that means it will trim everything in the parens from the target working from the outside of the target string. so this >>> '123asd098'.Trim('810')`` <<< will give you 23asd09`.

js2010 · Accepted Answer · 2019-06-17 18:50:12Z

0

If that were xml, it would be straightforward

[xml]$xml = '<Text Name="Text5"><TextValue>Hostname:   hostnamehere</TextValue></Text>'
(-split $xml.text.textvalue)[1]

hostnamehere

answered Jun 17, 2019 at 18:50

js2010

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1 Comment

amatthew382 Over a year ago

It's XML, but because there's a custom schema powershell wasn't reading it properly. So now I'm working on parsing the plaintext.

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