Powershell string -Replace unexpected results

PowerShell Help
1

I have google around this but have been unsuccessful in finding an answer. The following code gives unexpected results. I would expect the string “some string with a question mark in it” to be returned. But instead the original string is returned. The question mark seems to be causing issues. It doesn’t seem to be acting like a regex wild card or any other sort of wild card. Is this expected behavior and if so how do you escape a question mark so I can search for a string containing a question mark

"some string w?th a question mark in it" -replace 'w?th', 'with'
2

You can do something like this

$str = "some string w?th a question mark in it"
($str).Replace( "w?th", "with")

or you can use
$Str = gc C:\Test\Test.txt <– Read from the text file
($str).Replace( "w?th", "with")

Output:
some string with a question mark in it

3

PowerShell’s -replace operator uses regular expressions. In this case, you’d just need to escape that question mark with a backslash, because the question mark is a special character in regex:

"some string w?th a question mark in it" -replace 'w\?th', 'with'
4

Thanks every one. I had been trying to escape the question mark with a back tick

5

How does this work if we are replacing using variables, the contents of which are a string that may or may not contain a question mark?

For example:

$line1 = $lineReadInFromATextFileWhichMayOrMayNotContainAQuestionMark
# $line1 = "myWsdl=http://server/path?wsdl"
$pos = $line1.IndexOf("=")
$str1 = $line1.Substring($pos+1)
# $str1 = "http://server/path?wsdl"
$str2 = $generatedStringToReplaceStr1
# $str2 = "http://newserver/newpath?wsdl"
$line1 = $line1 -replace $str1, $str2
# $line1 = "myWsdl=http://newserver/newpath?wsdl"

I’d prefer to do using Powershell “-replace” because I also need to use the power of “-match” with these variables:

if (somehash.Keys -match $str1) { ...

How can this be achieved?

6

You can use [regex]::Escape($str1) to inject the backslashes where needed.

7

Do you really care about the word match or do you just want to get rid of the question mark(s)?

"some s?tring w?th a questio?n mark in it" -replace '\?', ''
8

Thanks Dave, that worked.

I’ve tested and I can now do the following to get the correct results:

$line1 = $line1 -replace [regex]::Escape($str1),$str2
if ($somehash.Keys -match [regex]::Escape($str1)) {...