Select-String Doesn't Show All Matches With Get-AppxPackage

Question

I get all the packages installed on my PC using Get-AppxPackage and I\'m trying to find all the matches in that with N lines before and after using Select

Answer 1

Select-String, when given input other than strings, uses simple .ToString() stringification^[1] on each input object before looking for the given pattern.

In your case, the [Microsoft.Windows.Appx.PackageManager.Commands.AppxPackage] instances output by Get-AppXPackage stringify to the full package names (e.g., Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_44.18362.387.0_neutral__8wekyb3d8bbwe), which explains your output.

In order to make Select-String search the for-display string representations of objects - as they would print to the console and as they would appear in a file saved to with > / Out-File (cat is Out-File's built-in alias on Windows) - you must, surprisingly, use Out-String -Stream as an intermediate pipeline segment:

Get-AppxPackage | Out-String -Stream | Select-String -Pattern 'edge' -Context 3, 3

Out-String uses PowerShell's formatting system to produce human-friendly display representations of the input objects, the same way that default console output, the Format-* cmdlets, and > / Out-File do.
-Stream causes the output lines to be sent through the pipeline one by one.

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Given that the solution is both non-obvious and cumbersome, it would be nice if Select-String directly supported this behavior, say via a switch parameter named -FromFormattedOutput, as detailed in this feature request on GitHub - up-vote the proposal there if you agree.

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^{[1] More accurately, .psobject.ToString() is called, either as-is, or - if the object's ToString method supports an IFormatProvider-typed argument - as .psobject.ToString([cultureinfo]::InvariantCulture) so as to obtain a culture-invariant representation - see this answer for more information.}