I am trying to replace the unnecessary double quotation marks in the names without a double quotation. For now, I know the names But I wanted the code to be dynamic. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

$FilePath = "C:\Test\"
Get-ChildItem $FilePath -Filter | ForEach-Object {
(Get-Content $_.FullName -Raw) | Foreach-Object {
$_ -replace  ',"Frederick "Fred"",' , ',"Frederick Fred",' `
-replace  ',"Brian "Josiah"",' , ',"Brian Josiah",' ` 
-replace  ',""",' , ',"",'
} | Set-Content $_.FullName
}

CodePudding user response：

Use a regex:

# Sample input
$str = '"Frederick "Fred"","Brian "Josiah"",""""'

$str -replace '(?m)(?<=,|^)"([^,"]*)"([^,"]*)""(?=,|$)', '"$1$2"'

Output:

"Frederick Fred","Brian Josiah",""

For an explanation of the regex and the chance to experiment with it, see this regex101.com page (note that the " chars. on the linked page are escaped as \", because the regex as a whole is enclosed in "...", unlike in '...', as above).

CodePudding user response：

here's a way to get rid of unwanted double quotes that does not use [mind melting for some of us] regex. [grin]

the code ...

$TwoDoubleQuotes = '""'
$OneDoubleQuote = '"'
$SpaceDQ = ' "'
$Space = ' '

$InString = '"Frederick "Fred"","Brian "Josiah"",""""'
$OutString = $InString.Replace($TwoDoubleQuotes, $OneDoubleQuote).Replace($SpaceDQ, $Space)

$InString
$OutString

the output ...

"Frederick "Fred"","Brian "Josiah"",""""
"Frederick Fred","Brian Josiah",""

what the code does ...

• defines some really simple minded constants
  the string patterns are hard for me to read, so this bypasses that. [grin]
• defines the inbound string
• chains the .Replace() string method
  that replaces the 2xDQ with 1xDQ and then replaces the SpaceDQ with just a Space.
• saves the new string to a $Var
• displays both the old & new string for your viewing pleasure