Removing specific words from a text string?

Question

So say you have a variable string like: "Report to Sam.Smith"

What's the best way for you to remove the words 'Report' and 'to' leaving only Sam.Smith using Powershell??

Answer 1

You have to use -replace :

$string = "Report to Sam.Smith"
$string = $string -replace "Report to ",""
$string # Output --> "Sam.Smith"

Or like this :

$string = "Report to Sam.Smith"
$string = $string.replace("Report to ","")
$string # Output --> "Sam.Smith"

But if you need to use Regex because the string's words can vary then you have to rethink the problem.

You won't be looking to erase a part of the string but to extract something out of it.

In you case, I think that you're looking for a username using a name.lastname format which is pretty easy to capture :

$string = "Report to Sam.Smith"
$string -match "\s(\w*\.\w*)"
$Matches[1] # Output --> Sam.Smith

Using -match will return True / False.

If it does return True, an array named $Matches will be created. It will contains on index 0 ($Matches[0]) the whole string that matched the regex.

Every others index greater than 0 will contains the captured text from the regex parenthesis called "capture group".

I would highly recommend using an if statement because if your regex return false, the array $Matches won't exist :

$string = "Report to Sam.Smith"
if($string -match "\s(\w*\.\w*)") {
    $Matches[1] # Output --> Sam.Smith
}