Powershell - print only text between quotes?

Question

How can I have the output of the following text only show the text in the quotes (without the quotes)?

Sample text\"

this is an \"apple\". it is red
this         


        

Answer 1

A concise solution based on .NET method [regex]::Matches(), using PSv3+ syntax:

$str = @'
this is an "apple". it is red
this is an "orange". it is orange
this is an "blood orange". it is reddish
'@

[regex]::Matches($str, '".*?"').Value -replace '"'

Regex ".*?" matches "..."-enclosed tokens and .Matches() returns all of them; .Value extracts them, and -replace '"' strips the " chars.

This means that the above even works with multiple "..." tokens per line (though note that extracting tokens with embedded escaped " chars. (e.g, \") won't work).

---

Use of the -match operator - which only looks for a (one) match - is an option only if:

• you split the input into lines
• and each line contains at most 1 "..." token (which is true for the sample input in the question).

Here'a PSv4+ solution:

# Split string into lines, then use -match to find the first "..." token
($str -split "`r?`n").ForEach({ if ($_ -match '"(.*?)"') { $Matches[1] } })  

Automatic variable $Matches contains the results of the previous -match operation (if the LHS was a scalar) and index [1] contains what the 1st (and only) capture group ((...)) matched.

---

It would be handy if -match had a variant named, say, -matchall, so that one could write:

# WISHFUL THINKING (as of PowerShell Core 6.2)
$str -matchall '".*?"' -replace '"'

See this feature suggestion on GitHub.

Answer 2

Just another way using regex:

appcmd list apppool | % { [regex]::match( $_ , '(?<=")(.+)(?=")' ) } | select -expa value

or

 appcmd list apppool | % { ([regex]::match( $_ , '(?<=")(.+)(?=")' )).value }

Answer 3

here is one way

$text='this is an "apple". it is red
this is an "orange". it is orange
this is an "blood orange". it is reddish'

$text.split("`n")|%{
$_.split('"')[1]
}

This is the winning solution

$text='this is an "apple". it is red
this is an "orange". it is orange
this is an "blood orange". it is reddish'

$text|%{$_.split('"')[1]}