Powershell - Regular Expression Multiple Matches
I used your sample data in a here-string for my testing. This should work although it can depend on where your sample data comes from.
Using powershell 3.0 I have the following
$getdevice | select-string -pattern '(?smi)(Device\s#\d+?(.*?)*?(?=Device\s#|\Z))' -AllMatches | ForEach-Object {$_.Matches} | ForEach-Object {$_.Value}
or if your PowerShell Verison supports it...
($getdevice | select-string -pattern '(?smi)(Device\s#\d+?(.*?)*?(?=Device\s#|\Z))' -AllMatches).Matches.Value
Which returns 4 objects with their device id's. I don't know if you wanted those or not but the regex can be modified with lookarounds if you don't need those. I updated the regex to account for device id with more that one digit as well in case that happens.
The modifiers that I used
s
modifier: single line. Dot matches newline charactersm
modifier: multi-line. Causes ^ and $ to match the begin/end of each line (not only begin/end of string)i
modifier: insensitive. Case insensitive match (ignores case of [a-zA-Z])
Another regex pattern thats works in this way that is shorter
'(?smi)(Device\s#).*?(?=Device\s#|\Z)'
With your existing regex, to get a list of all matches in a string, use one of these options:
Option 1
$regex = [regex] '(Device\s#\d(\n.*)*?(?=\n\s*Device\s#|\Z))'$allmatches = $regex.Matches($yourString);if ($allmatches.Count > 0) { # Get the individual matches with $allmatches.Item[]} else { # Nah, no match}
Option 2
$resultlist = new-object System.Collections.Specialized.StringCollection$regex = [regex] '(Device\s#\d(\n.*)*?(?=\n\s*Device\s#|\Z))'$match = $regex.Match($yourString)while ($match.Success) { $resultlist.Add($match.Value) | out-null $match = $match.NextMatch()}
While it doesn't exactly answer your question, I'll offer a slightly different approach:
($getdevice) -split '\s+(?=Device #\d)' | select -Skip 1
Just for fun,
$drives = ($getdevice) -split '\s+(?=Device #\d)' | select -Skip 1 |foreach { $Stringdata = $_.replace(' : ','=') -replace 'Device #(\d)','Device = $1' -Replace 'Device is a (\w+)','DeviceIs = $1' New-Object PSObject -Property $(ConvertFrom-StringData $Stringdata) } $drives | select Device,DeviceIs,'Total Size'Device DeviceIs Total Size ------ -------- ---------- 0 Hard drive 70007 MB 1 Hard drive 70007 MB 2 Hard drive 286102 MB 3 Hard drive 286102 MB