Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting - Second Edition

Ranges

The hyphen is used to define a range of characters. For example, we might want to match any number repeated one or more times (using +):

'1st place' -match '[0-9]+'    # $matches[0] is "1" 
'23rd place' -match '[0-9]+'   # $matches[0] is "23" 

A range in a character class can be any range of ASCII characters, such as the following examples:

• a-z
• A-K
• 0-9
• 1-5
• !-9 (0-9 and the ASCII characters 33 to 47)

The following returns true as " is character 34 and # is character 35 that is, they are within the range !-9:

PS> '"#' -match '[!-9]+'; $matches[0]True"# 

The range notation allows hexadecimal numbers within strings to be identified. A hexadecimal character can be identified by a character class containing 0-9 and a-f:

PS> 'The registry value ...