Powershell capture text within quotes - powershell

Question

I have a line saved as $variable1, for example:
file"yourtxthere/i/master.ext" autostart:true, width
How would I go about writing the correct syntax using Regex in Powershell to grab everything within the quotes. Are regular expressions the best way to do this in Powershell?

Answer 1

Though regular expressions are powerful, this is a simple case. Thus a simple solution is based on string object's split() method.
$variable1 = 'file"yourtxthere/i/master.ext" autostart:true, width'
# Splitting requires at least one "
if ($variable1.IndexOf('"') -gt 0) {
$variable1.Split('"')[1]
}
Splitting the string will result an array of three elements:
file
yourtxthere/i/master.ext
autostart:true, width
As Powershell's arrays begin with index zero, the desired data is at index location 1. In case the string doesn't contain a double quote, the split won't work. This is checked with the statement
if ($variable1.IndexOf('"') -gt 0)
Without one, splitting a quoteless string would return just a one-celled array and trying to access index 1 would result in an error message:
$variable1.Split('!')[1]
Index was outside the bounds of the array.

Answer 2

I'm not 100% sure I understand the question but assuming you had that stored in $variable1 as a string like so:
$variable1 = 'file"yourtxthere/i/master.ext" autostart:true, width'
Then you could extract just the quoted text by splitting the string using the double quotes as a delimiter like this:
$variable1.Split('"')[1]
That splits the string into an array with three parts. The first part is everything before the first double quotes and the second everything in between the first and second quote marks, and the third everything after the second quotation marks. The [1] tells it to output the second part.
I think this picture might illustrate it a little better.
There are other ways to split that up and in fact the variable isn't necessary at all if you do something like this:
('file"yourtxthere/i/master.ext" autostart:true, width').split('"')[1]
That will work fine so long as there are never any extra double quotes before the first occurrence.