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Replacing only the first occurrence of a word in a string

Tags:

powershell

I am having some issues with regular expression mainly because I think the information I can find is not specifically for powershell and all the samples I have tried either error or don't work as intended. I am trying to replace the first occurrence of a word in a string with another word but not replace any other occurrences of that word. for an example take the string:

My name is Bob, her name is Sara.

I would like to replace the first occurrence of name with baby so the resulting string would be

My baby is Bob, her name is Sara.

I have been working in https://regex101.com/ to try to build and see what is selected as I go but as I said none of these have a powershell flavor of regex. In that I can just turn off the global flag and it seems to select the first occurrence but not in powershell. So I am really at a loss of where to begin all really have at this point is selecting all occurrences of the word namewith:

$test = "My name is Bob, her name is Sara."
$test -replace 'name', 'baby'
like image 400
themackyo Avatar asked Oct 17 '16 14:10

themackyo


2 Answers

One way to replace n times:

$test = "My name is Bob, her name is Sara."
[regex]$pattern = "name"
$pattern.replace($test, "baby", 1) 

> My baby is Bob, her name is Sara
like image 63
Alex K. Avatar answered Oct 23 '22 11:10

Alex K.


You could capture everything before and behind and replace it:

'My name is Bob, her name is Sara.' -replace '(.*?)name(.*)', '$1baby$2'
like image 6
Martin Brandl Avatar answered Oct 23 '22 09:10

Martin Brandl