Split string with PowerShell and do something with each token

Question

I want to split each line of a pipe on spaces  and then print each token on its own line   I realise that I can get this result using    cat someFileInsteadOfAPipe  split        But I want more flexibility  I want to be able to do just about anything with each token   I used to use AWK on Unix  and I m trying to get the same functionality    I currently have   echo  Once upon a time there were three little pigs       data      split       Write-Output     data 0   and whatever I want to output with it     Which  obviously  only prints the first token  Is there a way for me to for-each over the tokens  printing each in turn   Also  the    data      split       Write-Output     data 0     part I got from a blog  and I really don t understand what I m doing or how the syntax works   I want to google for it  but I don t know what to call it  Please help me out with a word or two to Google  or a link explaining to me what the   and all the   symbols do  as well as the significance of the opening and closing brackets   I realise I can t actually use  cat someFileInsteadOfAPipe  split       since the file  or preferable incoming pipe  contains more than one line   Regarding some of the answers   If you are using Select-String to filter the output before tokenizing  you need to keep in mind that the output of the Select-String command is not a collection of strings  but a collection of MatchInfo objects  To get to the string you want to split  you need to access the Line property of the MatchInfo object  like so   cat someFile   Select-String  keywordFoo         Line Split

User · Answer

To complement Justus Thane s helpful answer    As Joey notes in a comment  PowerShell has a powerful  regex-based -split operator    In its unary form  -split         -split behaves like awk s default field splitting  which means that    Leading and trailing whitespace is ignored  Any run of whitespace  e g   multiple adjacent spaces  is treated as a single separator    In PowerShell v4  an expression-based - and therefore faster - alternative to the ForEach-Object cmdlet became available  the  ForEach   array  collection  method  as described in this blog post  alongside the  Where   method  a more powerful  expression-based alternative to Where-Object     Here s a solution based on these features   PS gt   -split     One      for the money      ForEach    token           token   One  token   for  token   the  token   money    Note that the leading and trailing whitespace was ignored  and that the multiple spaces between One and for were treated as a single separator

User · Answer

-split outputs an array  and you can save it to a variable like this    a   -split  Once  upon    a     time   a 0   Once   Another cute thing  you can have arrays on both sides of an assignment statement    a  b  c   -split  Once  upon    a   c  a

User · Answer

Once upon a time there were three little pigs  Split        ForEach           is a token       The key is     which stands for the current variable in the pipeline   About the code you found online       is an alias for ForEach-Object  Anything enclosed inside the brackets is run once for each object it receives  In this case  it s only running once  because you re sending it a single string        Split      is taking the current variable and splitting it on spaces  The current variable will be whatever is currently being looped over by ForEach

User · Answer

Another way to accomplish this is a combination of Justus Thane s and mklement0 s answers   It doesn t make sense to do it this way when you look at a one liner example  but when you re trying to mass-edit a file or a bunch of filenames it comes in pretty handy    test       One      for the money      option    System StringSplitOptions   RemoveEmptyEntries    test split      option   foreach       This will come out as   One for the money

[string] Split string with PowerShell and do something with each token

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