How to make changes to file content and save it to another file using powershell? - powershell

Question

I want to do this
read the file
go through each line
if the line matches the pattern, do some changes with that line
save the content to another file
For now I use this script:
$file = [System.IO.File]::ReadLines("C:\path\to\some\file1.txt")
$output = "C:\path\to\some\file2.txt"
ForEach ($line in $file) {
if($line -match 'some_regex_expression') {
$line = $line.replace("some","great")
}
Out-File -append -filepath $output -inputobject $line
}
As you can see, here I write line by line. Is it possible to write the whole file at once ?
Good example is provided here :
(Get-Content c:\temp\test.txt) -replace '\[MYID\]', 'MyValue' | Set-Content c:\temp\test.txt
But my problem is that I have additional IF statement...
So, what could I do to improve my script ?

Answer 1

You could do it like that:
Get-Content -Path "C:\path\to\some\file1.txt" | foreach {
if($_ -match 'some_regex_expression') {
$_.replace("some","great")
}
else {
$_
}
} | Out-File -filepath "C:\path\to\some\file2.txt"
Get-Content reads a file line by line (array of strings) by default so you can just pipe it into a foreach loop, process each line within the loop and pipe the whole output into your file2.txt.

Answer 2

In this case Arrays or Array List(lists are better for large arrays) would be the most elegant solution. Simply add strings in array until ForEach loop ends. After that just flush array to a file.
This is Array List example
$file = [System.IO.File]::ReadLines("C:\path\to\some\file1.txt")
$output = "C:\path\to\some\file2.txt"
$outputData = New-Object System.Collections.ArrayList
ForEach ($line in $file) {
if($line -match 'some_regex_expression') {
$line = $line.replace("some","great")
}
$outputData.Add($line)
}
$outputData |Out-File $output

Answer 3

I think the if statement can be avoided in a lot of cases by using regular expression groups (e.g. (.*) and placeholders (e.g. $1, $2 etc.).
As in your example:
(Get-Content .\File1.txt) -Replace 'some(_regex_expression)', 'great$1' | Set-Content .\File2.txt
And for the good example" where [MYID\] might be somewhere inline:
(Get-Content c:\temp\test.txt) -Replace '^(.*)\[MYID\](.*)$', '$1MyValue$2' | Set-Content c:\temp\test.txt
(see also How to replace first and last part of each line with powershell)