PowerShell to the rescue (again!)

 

Using PowerShell to replace text in a file.

I have a custom class next week. I need to make a little fix to the lab files… actually 526 .css files and 380 .htm files need to be updated with several fixes in each. Lots of little fixes.

 

How did I know how many files?  PowerShell of course…

(Get-ChildItem *.css –Recurse).count

 

Find and replace some text…

First update was to fix some URLs. I needed to remove a backslash at the start of every "href=" and "src=".  A little PowerShell could also do all of the file edits!

$from = 'href="/'
$to = 'href="'

Get-ChildItem *.htm -recurse |
%{
     $name = $_.fullname; Write-Host $name; (Get-Content $name) |
     %{ $_ -replace $from,$to } |
     Set-Content -path $name –force
}

I wrapped the above line in a function, called it eight times with my eight replacements, and it was done in seconds!

 

Notes:

Find all of the files…

  Get-ChildItem *.htm -recurse

and run some code on each one:

   %{   }

Save the file path to a variable, display the file path and then get the file's contents:

   $name = $_.fullname;
   Write-Host $name;
  (Get-Content $name)

The pipe then has the text to be replaced, so let's do the replace:

   %{ $_ -replace $from, $to }

And write the replaced text out to a file with the same name:

   Set-Content -path $name –force

 

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