Trouble escaping backslashes using replace

Question

I am looking to use the PowerShell replace function to replace part of a network path. I am having troubles with how to handle backslashes (\)

"\\Share\Users\Location\Username" -ireplace  "\\Share\Users","\\NewShare\AllUsers"

The above code will produce an error, so I looked at escaping using [Regex]::Escape but it will not replace the text:

[Regex]::Escape( "\\Share\Users\Location\Username") -ireplace  [Regex]::Escape("\\Share\Users"),[Regex]::Escape("\\NewShare\AllUsers")

This is what I get:

\\\\Share\\Users\\Location\\Username

All I need is:

\\Share\Users replaced by \\NewShare\AllUsers to produce \\NewShare\AllUsers\Location\Username

My knowledge is limited for regular expressions at the moment, so I was wondering if someone could kindly help me :)

Answer 1

\ is a special character in regex, and \U in \Users causes it to look for a special command U which doesn't exist. You need to escape the backslashes:

"\\Share\Users\Location\Username" -ireplace  "\\\\Share\\Users", "\\NewShare\AllUsers"

Basically [RegEx]::Escape() was the right approach but the key is to only use it on the parameters that are actually regular expressions (the second one).

Answer 2

You should be able to use ireplace, just adjust your first parameter like so:

"\\Share\Users\Location\Username" -ireplace  "\\\\Share\\Users","\\NewShare\AllUsers"

Notice I had to escape the backslashes because that is treated as a regex whereas the first and 3rd parameters are treated as strings.