Chapter 24. Using regular expressions to parse text files
Regular expressions are one of those awkward topics. We often have students ask us to explain them, only to realize—halfway through the conversation—that they didn’t need regular expressions at all. A regex, as a regular expression is sometimes known, is useful in text parsing, which is something you end up doing a lot in UNIX and Linux operating systems. In PowerShell, you tend to do less text parsing—and you tend to need regexes less often. That said, we certainly know of times when, in PowerShell, you need to parse textual content such as an IIS log file. That’s how we cover regular expressions in this chapter: as a tool to parse text files.
Don’t get us wrong: There’s much more you can do with regular expressions, and we cover a few of those things at the end of this chapter. But to make sure you have a good expectation up front, let’s be clear that we don’t cover regular expressions comprehensively or exhaustively in this book. Regular expressions can get incredibly complicated. They’re an entire technology unto themselves. We’ll get you started, and try to do so in a way that’s immediately applicable to many production environments, and then we’ll give you some pointers for digging deeper on your own, if that’s your need.