Remove particular characters from lines and concatenate them - powershell

Question

I have a problem where I need to cut specific characters from a line and then concatenate the line with the next lines, separated by commas.
Consider there is a text file abc.txt and I need the last 3 lines from the file. The last 3 lines are in the this format:
11/7/2000 17:22:54 - Hello world.
19/7/2002 8:23:54 - Welcome to the new technology.
24/7/2000 9:00:13 - Eco earth
I need to remove the starting time stamp from each line and then concatenate the lines as
Hello world.,Welcome to the new technology,Eco earth.
The time stamp is not static and I want to make use of a regex
I tried the following:
$Words = (Get-Content -Path .\abc.txt|Select-Object -last 3|Out-String)
$Words = $Words -split('-')
$regex = "[0-9]{1,2}/[0-9]{1,2}/[0-9]{1,4} [0-9]{1,2}:[0-9]{1,2}:[0-9]{1,2}):[0-9]{1,3}"
The output I used to get is like
11/7/2000 17:22:54
Hello world
19/7/2002 8:23:54
Welcome to the new technology.
24/7/2000 9:00:13
Eco earth

Answer 1

There is no need to create a Regex that tries to figure out the timestamp part, because you want to skip that anyway.
This should work:
# read the file and get the last three lines as string array
$txt = Get-Content -Path 'D:\abc.txt' -Tail 3
# loop through the array and change the lines as you go
for ($i = 0; $i -lt $txt.Count; $i++) {
$txt[$i] = ($txt[$i] -split '-', 2)[-1].Trim()
}
# finally, join the array with commas
$txt -join ','
Output:
Hello world.,Welcome to the new technology.,Eco earth

Answer 2

try this:
Get-Content "C:\temp\example.txt" | %{
$array=$_ -split "-", 2
$array[1].Trim()
}

Answer 3

When you have for example : "DATE - blablabla"
If you do .Split("-") on it you get :
Date
blablabla
What you can do is $string.Split("-")[Which_Line] -> so
$string="12/15/18 08:05:10 - Hello World."
$string=$string.Split("-")[1]
Returns : Hello world. (with spaces before)
Now on string you can apply Trim() function - it removes spaces before and after your string
$string=$string.Trim()
Gives you Hello world.
For your answer, if it's static usage (always 3) :
$Words = (Get-Content -Path .\abc.txt|Select-Object -last 3|Out-String).Split("-")
$end=$Words[2].Trim() + "," + $Words[4].Trim() + "," + $Words[6].Trim()