I am using PowerShell to perform a series of replace functions against a variable, therefore am trying to keep it that way rather than write more lines of code to manipulate.
I have a regex with finds an expression that begins and ends with a wildcard and looks for a specific text with the string. Once it finds a match, I want it to take what it found and just give me the first character and allow me to add one more character to it. I have tried the $0
value but this seems to be the whole match and not part of the match
I am using -replace '^(.*INS).*?.*'
and so if the text has "INS" in it I want the text replace to whatever the very first character in the match found is with an added character, for example "V!"
.
Is this possible or at least be able to convert it to the first character in the match and turn the rest into repeating characters as I can piggy-back other replaces off this.
use $1 for the first match
however you dont want INS inside it but the first characer
hence (.) followed by more characters .* and the your INS
"binsISTable" -replace '^(.).*INS.*', '$1!'
i added the exclamation mark in the output after that