How to find specific string, with certain starting and ending character in Powershell - powershell

Question

how to find all the strings which starts with open square bracket and ends with close square bracket in text file.
used below code but getting some unwanted contents also. How to avoid those unwanted contents
Select-String -Path "text.txt" -Pattern '\['
input file:
some conents [hello]
adfhjadf adfjkkf [ghad]
[check] dfgsf sfgfs
required output file
[hello]
[ghad]
[check]

Answer 1

Here, try this:
$string = #'
some conents [hello]
adfhjadf adfjkkf [ghad]
[check] dfgsf sfgfs
'#
([regex]'\[.*?\]').Matches($string)
Note, this will match anything inside the brackets. If you're looking only for English characters you should refine the regex.
Output should look like this:
Groups : {0}
Success : True
Name : 0
Captures : {0}
Index : 13
Length : 7
Value : [hello]
Groups : {0}
Success : True
Name : 0
Captures : {0}
Index : 39
Length : 6
Value : [ghad]
Groups : {0}
Success : True
Name : 0
Captures : {0}
Index : 47
Length : 7
Value : [check]
If you just want to see the matches you can do:
PS /> ([regex]'\[.*?\]').Matches($string).Value
[hello]
[ghad]
[check]