Split string with PowerShell and do something with each token

Question

I want to split each line of a pipe on spaces, and then print each token on its own line.

I realise that I can get this result using:

(cat someFileIn         


        

Answer 1

To complement Justus Thane's helpful answer:

• As Joey notes in a comment, PowerShell has a powerful, regex-based -split operator.

  • In its unary form (-split '...'), -split behaves like awk's default field splitting, which means that:
    • Leading and trailing whitespace is ignored.
    • Any run of whitespace (e.g., multiple adjacent spaces) is treated as a single separator.

• In PowerShell v4+ an expression-based - and therefore faster - alternative to the ForEach-Object cmdlet became available: the .ForEach() array (collection) method, as described in this blog post (alongside the .Where() method, a more powerful, expression-based alternative to Where-Object).

Here's a solution based on these features:

PS> (-split '   One      for the money   ').ForEach({ "token: [$_]" })
token: [One]
token: [for]
token: [the]
token: [money]

Note that the leading and trailing whitespace was ignored, and that the multiple spaces between One and for were treated as a single separator.