Using powershell, how do I extract a 7-digit number from a subject-line (of an email ), regular expressions? - powershell

Question

I have the following code which lists the first 5 items in the Inbox folder (of Outlook).
How would I extract only the number portion of it( say - 7 digit arbitrary numberss, which are embedded within other text)? Then using Powershell commands, I'd really like to take those extracted numbers and dump them to a CSV file(thus, they can be easily incorporated into an existing spreadsheet I use).
Here's what I tried :
$outlook = new-object -com Outlook.Application
$sentMail = $outlook.Session.GetDefaultFolder(6) # == olFolderInbox
$sentMail.Items | select -last 10 TaskSubject # ideally, grabbing first 20
$matches2 = "\d+$"
$res = gc $sentMail.Items | ?{$_ -match $matches2 | %{ $_ -match $matches2 | out-null; $matches[1] }
but this does not run correctly, but rather .. keeps me hanging with awaiting-input symbol: like so :
>>
>>
>>
Do I need to perhaps create a separate variable in between the 1st part and 2nd part?

Answer 1

Not sure what the $matches variable is for but try to replace your last line with something like below.
For Subject Line Items:
$sentMail.Items | % { $_.TaskSubject | Select-String -Pattern '^\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}' | % {([string]$_).Substring(0,12)} }
For Message Body Items:
$sentMail.Items | % { ($_.Body).Split("`n") | Select-String -Pattern '^\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}' |% {([string]$_).Substring(0,12)} }
Here is a refrence to Select-String which I use pretty often.
https://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh849903.aspx
Here is a reference to the Phone number portion which I have never used but found pretty cool.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2011/03/24/use-powershell-to-search-a-group-of-files-for-phone-numbers.aspx
Good luck!
Here is an edited version for 7 digit extraction via subject line. This assumes the number has a space on each side but can be modified a bit if necessary. You may also want to adjust the depth by changing the -First portion to Select * or just making 100 deeper in range.
$outlook = New-Object -com Outlook.Application
$Mail = $outlook.Session.GetDefaultFolder(6) # Folder Inbox
$Mail.Items | select -First 100 TaskSubject |
% { $_.TaskSubject | Select-String -Pattern '\s\d{7}\s'} |
% {((Select-String -InputObject $_ -Pattern '\s\d{7}\s').Line).split(" ") |
% {if(($_.Length -eq 7) -and ($_ -match '\d{7}')) {$_ | Out-File -FilePath "C:\Temp\SomeFile.csv" -Append}}}

Answer 2

Some of this you have already addressed / figured out but I wanted to explain the issues with your current code.
If you expect multiple matches and want to return those then you would need to use Select-String with the -AllMatches parameter. Your regex, in your example, is currently looking for a sequence of digits at the end of the subject. That would only return one match so lets looks at the issues with your code.
$sentMail.Items | select -last 10 TaskSubject
You are filtering the last 10 items but you are not storing those for later use so they would merely be displayed on screen. We cover a solution later.
One of the primary reasons for using -match is to get the Boolean value that is returned for code like if blocks and where clauses. You can still use it in the way you intended. Looking at the current code in question:
$res = gc $sentMail.Items | ?{$_ -match $matches2 | %{ $_ -match $matches2 | out-null; $matches[1] }
The two big issues with this are you are calling Get-Content(gc) on each item. Get-Content is for pulling file data which $sentMail.Items is not. You also having a large where block. Where blocks will pass data to the output steam based on a true or false condition. Your malformed statement ?{$_ -match $matches2 | %{ $_ -match $matches2 | out-null; $matches[1] } wont do this... at least not well.
$outlook = new-object -com Outlook.Application
$sentMail = $outlook.Session.GetDefaultFolder(6) # == olFolderInbox
$matches2 = "\d+$"
$sentMail.Items | select -last 10 -ExpandProperty TaskSubject | ?{$_ -match $matches2} | %{$Matches[0]}
Take the last 10 email subjects and check if either of them match the regex string $matches2. If they do then return the string match to standard output.