I have a string:

[33m[TEST][90m [93ma wonderful testorius line[90m ([37mbite me[90m) which ends here.

You are not able to see it (as stackoverflow will remove it when I post it) but there is a special Unicode char before every [xxm where xx is a variable number and [ as well as m are fixed. You can find the special char here: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/mlocati/fdabcaeb8071d5c75a2d51712db24011/raw/b710612d6320df7e146508094e84b92b34c77d48/win10colors.cmd

So, it is like this (the special char is displayed here with a $):

$[33m[TEST]$[90m $[93ma wonderful testorius line$[90m ($[37mbite me$[90m) which ends here.

Now, I want to remove all $[xxm substrings in this line as it is only for colored monitor output but should not be saved to a log file.

So the expected outcome should be:

[TEST] a wonderful testorius line (bite me) which ends here.

I tried to use RegEx but I dont understand it (perhaps it is extra confusing due to the special char and the open bracked) and I am not able to use wildcards in a normal .Replace ("this","with_that") operation.

How am I able to accomplish this?

CodePudding user response：

In this simple case, the following -replace operation will do, but note that this is not sufficient to robustly remove all variations of ANSI / Virtual Terminal escape sequences:

# Sample input.
$formattedStr = '`e[33m[TEST]`e[90m `e[93ma wonderful testorius line`e[90m (`e[37mbite me`e[90m) which ends here.' -replace '`e', [char] 27

# Windows PowerShell solution. "$([char] 27)" expands to an ESC char.
$formattedStr -replace "$([char] 27)\[\d*m"

# PowerShell (Core) 7  solution, where "`e" directly represents an ESC char.
$formattedStr -replace "`e\[\d*m"

Generally speaking, it's advisable to look for options on programs producing such for-display-formatted strings to make them output plain-text strings instead, so that the need to strip escape sequences after the fact doesn't even arise.