Find combinations of two strings in multiple files - regex

Question

I want to search through files in a folder and find the following strings in each file and I want to output it to a file. I would like to find a combination of 2 strings in the files no matter how it is written in the file. I should be able to find these combination of strings even if a carriage return exists in the middle of these 2 strings.
Here's the code I have so far:
$Path = "C:\Promotion\Scripts"
$txt_string1 = "CREATE"
$txt_string2 = "PROC"
$PathArray = #()
$Results = "C:\Promotion\Errors\Deployment_Errors.txt"
# This code snippet gets all the files in $Path that end in ".sql".
Get-ChildItem $Path -Filter "*.sql" |
Where-Object { $_.Attributes -ne "Directory"} |
ForEach-Object {
If (Get-Content $_.FullName | Select-String -Pattern $txt_string2) {
$PathArray += $_.FullName
}
}
$PathArray | ForEach-Object {$_} | Out-File $Results

Answer 1

for find more than one string in txt file You should Use like this method
"hello","guy","hello guy" | Select-String -Pattern '(hello.*guy)|(guy.*hello)'
the result :
hello guy
after you find strings you want out-file
like that:
"hello","guy","hello guy" | Select-String -Pattern '(hello.*guy)|(guy.*hello)' | Out-File -FilePath c:\test.txt
now we see in test.txt
PS C:\> Get-Content test.txt
hello guy

Answer 2

You can do this without loops. Define the combinations of your two search terms as alternatives in a regular expression with multiline support enabled ((?ms)).
$basepath = 'C:\Promotion\Scripts'
$results = 'C:\Promotion\Errors\Deployment_Errors.txt'
$term1 = 'CREATE'
$term2 = 'PROC'
$pattern = "(?ms)($term1.*$term2|$term2.*$term1)"
Get-ChildItem "$basepath\*.sql" |
? { Get-Content $_.FullName -Raw | Select-String -Pattern $pattern } |
select -Unique -Expand FullName |
Out-File $results
Note that this will report any file that contains both terms anywhere in it, no matter what other text is between them. If you want to find only files that contain combinations of the two terms either not separated (CREATEPROC or PROCCREATE) or separated nothing but whitespace, change the pattern to this:
$pattern = "(?ms)($term1\s*$term2|$term2\s*$term1)"
Depending on your search terms it may also be a good idea to escape them before building the regular expression, so that you don't get unwanted meta characters (not likely with the two string literals you have, but just to be on the safe side):
$term1 = [regex]::Escape('CREATE')
$term2 = [regex]::Escape('PROC')