Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, Fourth Edition

21 Using regular expressions to parse text files

Regular expressions are one of those awkward topics. We often have students ask us to explain them, only to realize—halfway through the conversation—that they didn’t need regular expressions at all. A regex, as a regular expression is sometimes known, is useful in text parsing, which is something you end up doing a lot of in UNIX and Linux operating systems. In PowerShell, you tend to do less text parsing—and you tend to need regexes less often. That said, we certainly know of times when, in PowerShell, you need to parse textual content such as a log file. That’s how we cover regular expressions in this chapter: as a tool to parse text files.

Don’t get us wrong: there’s much more you can do with ...