Simple Question about splitting

PowerShell Help
1

Just wrapping my head around splitting text.

So i know the basics of splitting
[pre]
$text = OK - offset: -31 of 60 WARN - Offset is -31 sec (warn/crit at 30/60 sec)
$text -split"-"
[/pre]

What i would like is to only split on the first instance of OK - offset , not anywhere else.

Any idea of doing that?

TIA

2

Hi Wei-Yen Tan,
With -split, you can specify a second parameter that identifies the .
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.core/about/about_split?view=powershell-5.1

So, if you just want to split it into two substrings you can do the following.

$text = 'OK – offset: -31 of 60 WARN – Offset is -31 sec (warn/crit at 30/60 sec)'
$text -split "-",2

Results:

OK – offset: 
31 of 60 WARN – Offset is -31 sec (warn/crit at 30/60 sec)

See how it splits at the first instance of “-” and results in only 2 substrings?

Now you may ask why it split at the “-” in front of 31 instead of the “–” between OK and offset. This is because the “–” between OK and Offset is not a Hyphen-Minus character, it is what is called an En Dash (unicode character decimal 8211), so it is not matched when the split is looking for Hyphen-Minus (unicode character decimal 45)

3

Thanks for that Curtis. Works perfectly.