$drunk = @( 'berry', 'ferry', 'merry')

$drunk |where {$drunk -match 'b'}

returns the whole array:

berry
ferry
merry

 

I thought -match was supposed to just return the matching elements?

Hi,
$_ refers to the pipeline object.
you access $drunk in the scriptblock of where-object and the -match will return 'berry'. 'berry' will be converted to the Bool type and it is $true. So all of elements in the $drunk will be displayed on the console.

Thanks for the concise answer:

$drunk = @( 'berry', 'ferry', 'merry')

$drunk |where {$_ -match 'b'}

returns berry

 

now why doesn't this return anything?

 

$funk = 'b','f'

$drunk = @( 'berry', 'ferry', 'merry')

$drunk | where {$_ -match $funk}

 

will fail to find a match... that comma is read literaly not as an or as you intended it.

$drunk | ? { $_ -match "b" -or $_ -match "b"}
will return as intended but that’s a lot of typing. Instead, remember -match is a regex as such can process anything you could normally do in an (if|switch) statement.  With that in mind try,

$funk = "^[b,f]"
$drunk|?{$_ -match $funk}

^ dictates first character
[] says match any char contained within []
, dictates or So...

"^[b,f]" really means, where first character is equal to "b" or "f". 

help about_Regular_Expression is a great place to reference when you’re getting erroneous results.

So say in the above example if $funk was an array in memory (of email addresses), I would need to change the array to something that was regex-formatted?

It sounds like "diff -pass" is going to work better for me than -match for selecting objects(elements) in an array based on elements in another array.

Try this:

$func = 'b','f'
$ofs = '|'
$filter = "$func"
$drunk | ?{ $_ -match $filter }

Hey,

 

What does setting $filter equal to a variable do?

 

What does setting the pipe equal to a variable do?

 

Thanks,

 

-N1ck

1. Makes things cleaner for the very next line. Good style of scripting to use when you want the next guy to be able to figure out what the heck you wrote.

2. $ofs is a special variable, read this: http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2006/07/15/What-is-OFS.aspx