Powershell: Regex matching with Get-content -Raw flag results in empty results-CodePudding

Solution was adding (?ms) to the front of my regex query

I am trying to search for chunks of text within a file, and preserving the line breaks in a chunk.

When I define my variable as $variable = get-content $fromfile, my function (below) is able to find the text I'm looking for but it is difficult to parse further due to a lack of line breaks

function FindBetween($first, $second, $importing){

    $pattern = "$first(.*?)$second"
    
    $result = [regex]::Match($importing, $pattern).Groups[1].Value

    return $result
}

when I define my variable as $variable = get-content $fromfile -raw, the output of my query is blank. I'm able to print the variable, and it does preserve the line breaks.

I run into the same issue regardless of if I add \r\n to the end of my pattern, if I use @() around my variable definition, if I use -Delimiter \n, or any combination of all those.

Whole code is here:

param($fromfile)

$working = get-content $fromfile -raw

function FindBetween($first, $second, $importing){

    $pattern = "(?ms)$first(.*?)$second"
    
    $result = [regex]::Match($importing, $pattern).Groups[1].Value
    #$result = select-string -InputObject $importing -Pattern $pattern

    return $result
}


FindBetween -first "host ####" -second "#### flag 2" -importing $working | Out-File "testresult.txt"

the file I'm testing it against looks like:

#### flag 1 host ####

stuff in between

#### flag 2 server ####

#### process manager ####

As to why I'm doing this:
I'm trying to automate taking a file that has defined sections with titles and outputting the content of those separate sections into a .csv (each section is formatted drastically different from each other). These files are all uniform to each other, containing the same sections and general content.

CodePudding user response：

If you're doing -raw you probably need to change your RegEx to "(?ms)$first(.*?)$second" so that . will match new lines.