powershell extract text between two strings

Question

I know this question has been asked before but I can't get any of the answers I have looked at to work. I have a JSON file which has thousands of lines and want to simply extract the text between two strings every time they appear (which is a lot).

As a simple example my JSON would look like this:

    "customfield_11300": null,
    "customfield_11301": [
      {
        "self": "xxxxxxxx",
        "value": "xxxxxxxxx",
        "id": "10467"
      }
    ],
    "customfield_10730": null,
    "customfield_11302": null,
    "customfield_10720": 0.0,
    "customfield_11300": null,
    "customfield_11301": [
      {
        "self": "zzzzzzzzzzzzz",
        "value": "zzzzzzzzzzz",
        "id": "10467"
      }
    ],
    "customfield_10730": null,
    "customfield_11302": null,
    "customfield_10720": 0.0,

So I want to output everything between "customfield_11301" and "customfield_10730":

      {
        "self": "xxxxxxxx",
        "value": "xxxxxxxxx",
        "id": "10467"
      }
    ],
      {
        "self": "zzzzzzzzzzzzz",
        "value": "zzzzzzzzzzz",
        "id": "10467"
      }
    ],

I'm trying to keep it as simple as possible - so don't care about brackets being displayed in the output.

This is what I have (which outputs way more than what I want):

$importPath = "todays_changes.txt"
$pattern = "customfield_11301(.*)customfield_10730"

$string = Get-Content $importPath
$result = [regex]::match($string, $pattern).Groups[1].Value
$result

Answer 1

The quick answer is - change your greedy capture (.*) to non greedy - (.*?). That should do it.

customfield_11301(.*?)customfield_10730

Otherwise the capture will eat as much as it can, resulting in it continuing 'til the last customfield_10730.

Regards