50

I would like to split a string witch has a variable whitespace characters, but a get a lot of empty lines which I would like to eliminate. this code

$text = "Video  Video  Audio  Audio  VBI    VBI"
$text.Split()

outputs this

Video

Video

Audio

Audio

VBI



VBI

PS H:\>

and I would like this

Video
Video
Audio  
Audio
VBI
VBI

Very late edit:
Noticed this question is still getting a lot of views, so I would like to clarify that I had no knowledge of Functional Programming or Regular Expressions when I asked this question.
All the solutions mentioned here apply as there are multiple ways to remove whitespace and create an array from a string.

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1
  • Thank you for this question. I was also having an issue like this with the Split method. The number of spaces in my delimiter was fixed (each delimiter was 4 spaces as it was output from the reg QUERY command), but for whatever reason .Split(" ") would still give me the extra lines. Commented Sep 5 at 19:36

6 Answers 6

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64

You can use PowerShell's -split operator which uses regular expressions. 

"Video  Video  Audio  Audio  VBI    VBI" -split '\s+'

As noted by @StijnDeVos, this does not remove leading/trailing whitespace.

Here, the \s represents whitespace characters, and the + matches one or more of them. All the more reason to go with @user3554001's answer.

Another option is to filter the empty strings.

 "Video  Video  Audio  Audio  VBI    VBI".split()| where {$_}
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1 Comment

-split '\s+' doesn't remove leading and trailing whitespace, so you still need to filter out empty strings.
31

you can use this snippet to eliminate empty lines :

$text.split(" ",[System.StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries)
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2 Comments

This doesn't work if there is a tab in between the strings.
@randomuser15995183 it does if you specify tab character "`t". Try this, press Ctrl-J to break a line. [char]9 is a Tab char: "1 2 $([char]9)3 4".split(" `n`t",[System.StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries)
28

-split "Video Video Audio Audio VBI VBI"

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1 Comment

+1 I prefer this to my own answer. I forgot -split could be used as a unary operator.
8

Try this, it replaces more than one instance of a space with a single instance before carrying out the split command:

$($text -replace '\s+', ' ').split()
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2

The -split operator takes a regex argument, so just match multiple whitespace characters (\s+):

$Text = $text = "Video  Video  Audio  Audio  VBI    VBI"
$text -split '\s+' -match '\S'

Video
Video
Audio
Audio
VBI
VBI

Any trailing whitespace after the last one may leave you will a null entry, so the -match will eliminate anything that is only whitespace.

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1 Comment

k get replicasets | %{$_.split(" ") -match "\s"}
1

other solution :

$text -split ' ' | where {$_.Trim() -ne ''}

or :

$text.Split(' ').Where({$_.Trim() -ne ''})
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