Shorter Syntax for grabbing a string? [Select-String] - powershell

Question

I do a lot of regex matching using Select-String in Powershell.
For example, the simplest and maybe the most common match, an IPv4 address:
$regex = \b(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\b
Now, if I was to match this in a line that said:
$output = `
"Blah blah blah, 202.100.100.9, you're going to match the IP in the middle of this line,
but not on this line, because '2.a.3.one' is not a valid IPv4 address"
and then I do:
$output | Select-String $regex
It will give me the entire line.
I can't really use that in it's raw form.
However if I use this:
$output | Select-String $regex | %{$_.Matches} | %{$_.Value}
It will give me JUST the IP address, which is great.
My question is:
Is there a simpler way to do this?
I'd rather not type out | %{$.Matches} | %{$.Value} every time I want to grab just one particular string.

Answer 1

If you prefer Select-String over the -replace operator (which is just syntactic sugar for calling [Regex]::Replace), PowerShell V3 has a few shortcuts that can save some typing.
First, there is an alias for Select-String => sls.
Second, with simple foreach-object script blocks, you can replace the script block with just the property.
Combining these, you can use
$output | sls $regex | % Matches | % Value
To save even more typing, PowerShell can tab complete Matches but not Value.
Another option that is even less typing is to use property syntax:
($output | sls $regex).Matches.Value
As a bonus, tab completion can complete both Matches and Value in this example. Note that this second example works in V2 but only if there is a single matching line. If there are multiple matching lines, only in V3 will you see all the results, V2 would show nothing or an error if strict mode is enabled.

Answer 2

Try this:
$output -replace ".*($regex).*",'$1'

Answer 3

First I want to thank everyone for their help and their efforts in trying to figure this out for me. All of your suggestions have been good, and useful.
I had a think, and I realized that I am looking for a command that doesn't really exist, so I just wrote a function for it instead:
function Regex-Match {
[cmdletbinding()]
param (
[parameter(Position=0,Mandatory=$true,ValueFromPipeline=$false)]$RegexString,
[parameter(Position=1,Mandatory=$true,ValueFromPipeline=$true)]$SearchString
)
$Results = #($SearchString | Select-String -Pattern $RegexString | % {$_.Matches} | % {$_.Value})
Return $Results
}
To further shorten this, I can use
New-Alias -Name regx -Value Regex-match
Example command:
"test string" | regx "\w\s\w"
or
Regex-Match -SearchString (gc .\Stuff.txt) -RegexString "\w+"