Using -like to find strings with Powershell - regex

Question

In Powershell, I need to find multiple errors within a text file and the closest desired word between them. Each error is contained in an array. In the past, I would use the code:
#creating null array
$results = #("")
#creating index for array
for ($i = 0; $i -lt ($errors.length - 1); $i++)
{
$results += $false
}
#selecting string
for ($i = 0; $i -lt $errors.length; $i++)
{
$k = $errors[$i]
$rg = [regex]"WORD.*?$k.*?WORD"
$results[$i] = $content | Select-String -Pattern $rg -AllMatches | Foreach-Object {($_.Matches |
ForEach-Object {$_.value})}
}
$errors is the array of errors, $content is the content of the text file, and each item in $results holds the string from desired word to error to desired word.
Using $results[$i] = $content | Select-String -Pattern $rg -AllMatches | Foreach-Object {($_.Matches | ForEach-Object {$_.value})} does not work because my errors contain wild cards like asterisks.
I know that in order for me to do such characters, I need to use -like
I have tried using $results[$i] = $content -like $k instead, but that only returns a null value.

Answer 1

You can try:
for ($i = 0; $i -lt $errors.length; $i++)
{
$k = [regex]::Escape($errors[$i])
$rg = [regex]"(?s)WORD.*?$k.*?WORD"
$results[$i] = $content | Select-String -Pattern $rg -AllMatches |
Foreach-Object { $_.Matches.Value }
}
I do not know what is inside of $errors, $results, or $content. For what you want to work as intended while $content spans multiple lines, then $content will need to be a single string before being piped into Select-String. Otherwise, your regex will only match against one line at a time.
Since you may want .*? to match multiple lines, you should use the (?s) mode so that . can match new line characters.
If $errors contains characters that have special meaning in regex, you will need to backslash escape them. An easy way to do that is to call the Regex .NET class method Escape().