CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowspowershellescaping
Rajeev
Rajeev

Reputation: 903

Unable to escape pipe character (|) in powershell

I am trying to find number of pipe(|) characters in each line of a file. I am using following command to do so.

gc .\test.txt | % { ($_ | select-string "|" -all).matches | measure | select count }

Its not counting the pipe symbol.

I also tried

  1. `|
  2. '|'
  3.  |

Can anyone tell me how to escape pipe character in power shell?

If i am using strings or characters other than pipe the command is working properly.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 11788

Answers (2)

Joey
Joey

Reputation: 354694

Use the -SimpleMatch parameter for Select-String, which turns off regular expression matching.

Upvotes: 5

briantist
briantist

Reputation: 47832

A backslash \ is the escape character for a regular expression. 

gc .\test.txt | % { ($_ | select-string "\|" -all).matches | measure | select count }

If you're unsure, you can always use [RegEx]::Escape():

$pattern = [RegEx]::Escape("|")
gc .\test.txt | % { ($_ | select-string $pattern -all).matches | measure | select count }

The pipe otherwise does not have to be escaped in PowerShell inside a string.

Upvotes: 7

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