Powershell Scripting - Select-String

Question

I have a text file in the format as below:

Demo
1
2
3
[[1]]
[[2]]

In a Powershell script, I'm trying to find the first line number where the string matches [[.

$path = 'C:\Demo\Test.txt'
$pattern = "Demo"
$LineNumber = Select-String $path -Pattern $pattern | Select-Object LineNumber

The above code returns the line number 1 as @{LineNumber=1}

But I'm mainly interested to get the line number where it starts from [[. How do I achieve this, the script fails if I use [[ in the pattern.

Kindly help, thanks for all the suggestions.

Claire Furney · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-09 08:36:43Z

1

The parameter -Pattern uses a regular expression by default. [ has a special meaning in regular expressions so needs to be escaped (using \):

Select-String input.txt -Pattern "\[\[" | Select-Object LineNumber

Alternatively pass the -SimpleMatch parameter to treat -Pattern as a string instead:

Select-String input.txt -Pattern "[[" -SimpleMatch | Select-Object LineNumber

answered Oct 9, 2018 at 8:36

Claire Furney

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