Question

What Im Building:

The script archives a working directory using GIT-POSH and sends it to a Linux Apache Server using a Windows Powershell SSH Module.

For convenience, the script also needs to do reporting on existing files on the local machine as well as the Apache server.

The Problem:

This is where I need string manipulation to separate each block in the naming convention.

I was going to use underscores block_block until I realized some of the blocks contain underscores them already.
This is when I decided to encapsulate each block with brackets [block][block]

In PHP I would use preg_split to pull out each piece into an associative array.

[product][branch_name][date][time][commit_hash]

Expected Usage:

--> Get-Product $string
--> product123
--> Get-Branch $string
--> branch123

Questions I have:

• How do I preg_split this string the same way using powershell and apache?
• A better naming convention that supports the same operation?

Answer 1

PHP’s preg_split can be mimicked with System.RegularExpressions.Split(). There are some caveats, namely Split() will return empty strings for tokens it replaced, so some filtering is needed. Like so,

$data = "[product][branch_name][date][time][commit_hash]"
$arr = [Regex]::Split($data, "[\[\]]") | ? { $_.length -gt 0 }
$arr

Output:

product
branch_name
date
time
commit_hash

Without the filtering clause ? { $_.length -gt 0 } – which will exclude string objects that have length of zero – the output would be slightly different:

product

branch_name

date

time

commit_hash

This behaivour is documented in MSDN.