CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershelltextreplacefindpowershell-2.0
user3586898
user3586898

Reputation: 199

Powershell script for going into texts files within a directory and replacing characters

Morning all,

I'm trying to work out how to go into a number of text files within a directory, and replace the characters with the following:

'BS' = '\'

'FS' = '/'

'CO' = ':'

What I managed to get to so far is: 

(get-content C:\users\x\desktop\info\*.txt) | foreach-object {$_ -replace "bs", "\"} | set-content C:\Users\x\desktop\info\*.txt

I have got 6 text files, all with a line of text in them, the script above copies the line of text into all the text files. So what I end up with is 6 text files, each with 6 lines of text, I need 6 text files with 1 line of original text.

If that makes sense, does anyone have any pointers on this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 135

Answers (2)

Yannick Meeus
Yannick Meeus

Reputation: 5910

This should do the trick:

Get-ChildItem C:\users\x\desktop\info\*.txt | ForEach-Object {(Get-Content $_.PSPath) | Foreach-Object {$_ -replace "bs", "\"  -replace "fs", "/"  -replace "co", ":"} | Set-Content $_.PSPath}

The reason yours wasn't acting as you expected it to, is because you were literally taking all the contents out of all files using get-content. This acts as a string concatenation of all text in all files.

You first have to get a list of files, then pipe that into a foreach to get the contents per file, to then replace what you want replaced.

Upvotes: 0

Koja
Koja

Reputation: 11

Some other example, should do the same trick :)

$fileName = Get-ChildItem "C:\users\x\desktop\info\*.txt" -Recurse

$filename | %{
    (gc $_) -replace "BS","\" -replace "FS","/" -replace "CO",":" |Set-Content $_.fullname
}

Upvotes: 1

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