Regex works everywhere ( tried regex101 and regstorm.net) except Powershell

Question

I have tried various different combos and already checked other similar posts, but can't find my answer. I have a .config file and I need to exclude the comments from the file when I do my search, something like below:

(Get-Content C:\Path\File.config -Raw) | Select-String  '(<!--((?!-->)(.|\n))*-->)'  -AllMatches

I have tried the below regex as well:

(?smi)^\<!--.*?--\>?

Both of these work on regex101 and regex.net, but does not work at all with Powershell. This is how my .config file looks:

Test

<!--<add name=                                />
    <add name=                                />
    <add name=                                />-->
    <add name=                                />

<!--<add name=                                />
    <add name=                                />-->

Test
Test

I have made sure I am using -Raw with my get-content and also tried out-string. These regex work everywhere except, powershell. Your help is duly appreciated

Answer 1

Why are you trying to parse XML manually using Regex when Powershell has a perfectly good XML parser built-in?

To remove comments from an existing XML file, parse the file, find all the comments with an XPath expression, remove them, and save the file back out like this:

$xml = [xml](Get-Content C:\Path\File.config)
# You might need to tweak the XPath expression for your file,
# but this works for me on a random .NET app.config
$comments = $xml.SelectNodes('descendant::comment()')
$comments | %{ $_.ParentNode.RemoveChild($_) | out-null }
$xml.Save('C:\Path\File-output.config')

But it sounds like even that is overkill for what you're trying to do.

I am trying to output the file without any comments. Then, I will play with this output without comments and create a csv using this data.

In that case, why not just play with the parsed XML directly and just ignore the comments. Once you've parsed the file using the first line from the example above, you've got a perfectly good XML object with all the data that you can query, manipulate, and output as CSV. You shouldn't need to export the file without comments first.

If you need some help figuring out how to work with XML data in Powershell, there are literally thousands of articles online that can help. Google is your friend here.

Answer 2

(<!--((?!-->)(.|\r\n))*-->) worked in Notepad++ on Windows for me.

I believe \n is required on certain OSes and most web sites but \r\n is required on Windows. Apparently, each OS handles newlines slightly differently.

 

Update: 2017/08/16 12:39

This seemed to work for me: (Get-Content C:\Path\File.config -Raw) | Select-String '(<!--((?!-->)(.|\n))*-->)' -AllMatches | ForEach { $_.Matches.Value }