Looking to remove text from text file using powershell

Question

I'm trying to edit a large plain text document containing various html elements such as the following:

• <p> & </p>
• <script> & </script>
• <style> & </style>
• <div> & </div>
• And in more extreme cases; <span style="color: #ff0000;"> & </span>

My goal is to remove any <UniqueText> from a text file. I've not worked with powershell much so my knowledge is limited, none less, I gave it a shot.

For replacing all <UniqueText>

get-content "C:\Users\John\Desktop\input.txt" | -replace "\<.*?\>","" | Out-File C:\Users\John\Desktop\output.txt

The above script gives the following error:

-replace : The term '-replace' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program.

Answer 1

i use this command

Get-Content C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts | % {$_ -replace "some text","" -replace "some text",""} |Out-File C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

but the file become empty.

Answer 2

When you use -replace you have to be sure that you parse the string correctly to the call. There are two ways you can solve your problem:

1. Use foreach to go through each line of the file and use -replace on each line (this might be helpfull if you want to do something else with the lines):

get-content "C:\Users\John\Desktop\input.txt" | % {$_ -replace "\<.*?\>",""} | Out-File C:\Users\John\Desktop\output.txt

% is the alias for foreach

$_ is element of the foreach, so each line of the file

2. Use replace on the file without going through each line:

(get-content "C:\Users\John\Desktop\input.txt") -replace "\<.*?\>","" |  Out-File C:\Users\John\Desktop\output.txt