How to capture multiple regex matches, from a single line, into the $matches magic variable in Powershell?

Question

Let's say I have the string "blah blah F12 blah blah F32 blah blah blah" and I want to match the F12 and F32, how would I go about capturing both to the Powershell magic variable $matches?

If I run the following code in Powershell:

$string = "blah blah F12 blah blah F32 blah blah blah" $string -match "F\d\d" 

The $matches variable only contains F12

I also tried:

$string -match "(F\d\d)" 

This time $matches had two items, but both are F12

I would like $matches to contain both F12 and F32 for further processing. I just can't seem to find a way to do it.

All help would be greatly appreciated. :)

Answer 1

You can do this using Select-String in PowerShell 2.0 like so:

Select-String F\d\d -input $string -AllMatches | Foreach {$_.matches} 

A while back I had asked for a -matchall operator on MS Connect and this suggestion was closed as fixed with this comment:

"This is fixed with -allmatches parameter for select-string."

Answer 2

I suggest using this syntax as makes it easier to handle your array of matches:

$string = "blah blah F12 blah blah F32 blah blah blah" ; $matches = ([regex]'F\d\d').Matches($string); $matches[1].Value; # get matching value for second occurance, F32