Find first occurrence of any one of the array elements in a string - Powershell

Question

The problem is to find the position of the very first occurrence of any of the elements of an array.

$terms = @("#", ";", "$", "|");

$StringToBeSearched = "ABC$DEFG#";

The expected output needs to be: 3, as '$' occurs before any of the other $terms in the $StringToBeSearched variable

Also, the idea is to do it in the least expensive way.

Answer 1

# Define the characters to search for as an array of [char] instances ([char[]])
# Note the absence of `@(...)`, which is never needed for array literals,
# and the absence of `;`, which is only needed to place *multiple* statements
# on the same line.
[char[]] $terms = '#', ';', '$', '|'

# The string to search trough.
# Note the use of '...' rather than "...", 
# to avoid unintended expansion of "$"-prefixed tokens as
# variable references.
$StringToBeSearched = 'ABC$DEFG#'

# Use the [string] type's .IndexOfAny() method to find the first 
# occurrence of any of the characters in the `$terms` array.
$StringToBeSearched.IndexOfAny($terms)  # -> 3