How to get the captured groups from Select-String?

Question

I\'m trying to extract text from a set of files on Windows using the Powershell (version 4):

PS > Select-String -AllMatches -Pattern 

        

Answer 1

According to the powershell docs on Regular Expressions > Groups, Captures, and Substitutions:

When using the -match operator, powershell will create an automatic variable named $Matches

PS> "The last logged on user was CONTOSO\jsmith" -match "(.+was )(.+)"

The value returned from this expression is just true|false, but PS will add the $Matches hashtable

So if you output $Matches, you'll get all capture groups:

PS> $Matches

Name     Value
----     -----
2        CONTOSO\jsmith
1        The last logged on user was
0        The last logged on user was CONTOSO\jsmith

And you can access each capture group individually with dot notation like this:

PS> "The last logged on user was CONTOSO\jsmith" -match "(.+was )(.+)"
PS> $Matches.2
CONTOSO\jsmith

Additional Resources:

• To Get Multiple Matches, see How to capture multiple regex matches
• To Pass Options/Flags, see Pass regex options to PowerShell [regex] type