How to cut specific string? - powershell

Question

I have a string with different length. I want to cut a specific word in my string.
Please help, I am new to PowerShell.
I tried this code, it's still not what I need.
$String = "C:\Users\XX\Documents\Data.txt"
$Cut = $String.Substring(22,0)
$Cut
My expectation is that I can return the word Data.

Answer 1

Assuming the string is always the same format (i.e. a path ending in a filename), then there are quite a few ways to do this, such as using regular expressions. Here is a slightly less conventional method:
# Define the path
$filepath = "C:\Users\XX\Documents\Data.txt"
# Create a dummy fileinfo object
$fileInfo = [System.IO.FileInfo]$filePath
# Get the file name property
$fileInfo.BaseName
Of course, you could do all of this in one step:
([System.IO.FileInfo]"C:\Users\XX\Documents\Data.txt").BaseName

Answer 2

If the path is an existing one, you could use
(Get-Item $String).BaseName
Otherwise
(Split-Path $String -Leaf) -Replace '\.[^\.]*$'

Answer 3

While in that specific example the simplest way is to use Substring(startPosition,length) to extract file name you'd probably want to use something like this:
(("C:\Users\XX\Documents\Data.txt".split("\\"))[-1].Split("."))[0]
Explanation:
("C:\Users\XX\Documents\Data.txt".split("\\"))[-1]
that part split the path by \ and returns last item (escaping it seems to be not mandatory by the way so you can use .split("\") instead of .split("\\")). From it you receive Data.txt so you have to separate name and extension. You can do this by splitting by . and choosing first element returned

Answer 4

There are number of ways of doing it depending upon your input -
Method 1 - Hard-coding using the sub-string function.
$String = "C:\Users\XX\Documents\Data.txt"
$Cut = $String.Substring(22,4)
$Cut
The above approach will work for a single input but will become difficult to manage for multiple inputs of different lengths.
Method 2 - Using the split method
$String = "C:\Users\XX\Documents\Data.txt"
$cut = $String.Split("\")[-1].split(".")[0]
$cut
Split method will split string into substring. The index [-1] will return the last value returned by the split method.
The second split is to return the word Data from the word Data.txt.
Method 3 - If the input is a file path
$string = Get-ChildItem $env:USERPROFILE\Desktop -File | select -First 1
$Cut = $String.BaseName
More about method 3 here.

Answer 5

If you can use Powershell 6 - SplitPath
#Requires -Version 6.0
Split-Path $String -LeafBase