Question

is there a way to use foreach and replace on text file to change a character with linebreak and x number of indents? Peculiar request, but it is to make it readible in another program.

Sample text:

dyreriket|{Animalia}
!leddormer@{Annelida}
¤igler${Clitellata}

The symbols |, !, @, ¤, $ and many more should be replace with linebreak and a given number of indents. I can make the indents work, but not the linebreaks. There is no response when using `n, it only removes the original character. So far I’ve been playing around with this code.

$t1 = '\@';
$r1 = "`n`t`t";
$t2='\¤';
$r2="`n";

Get-Content C:\arter\test.txt `
    | ForEach-Object { $_ -creplace $t1, $r1; } `
    |ForEach-Object { $_ -creplace $t2, $r2; } `
    | Out-File  C:\arter\test2.txt ;  

Answer 1

You can do a line-by-line text replacement like this:

$searchText = '[|!@☼$]';
$replacementText = "`r`n`t`t";

Get-Content -Path Input.txt `
    | ForEach-Object { $_ -creplace $searchText, $replacementText; } `
    | Out-File -FilePath Output.txt;

That uses regular expression character classes to replace all occurrences of the |, !, @, ☼, or $ characters in Input.txt with a linefeed followed by a carriage return followed by two tabs and writes the resulting text to Output.txt. To perform a case-insensitive search, use the -replace or -ireplace operators.