Powershell: Can't Get RegEx to work on multiple lines

April 28, 2022

I am getting notes from a ticket that come in the form of:

[Employee ID]: 
[First Name]: Test
[Last Name]: User
[Middle Initial]: 
[Email]: 
[Phone]: 
[* Last 4 of SSN]: 1234

I’ve tried the following code to get the first name (in this example it would be ‘Test’:

    if ($incNotes -match '(^\[First Name\]:)(. * ?$)')
        {
            Write-Host $_.matches.groups[0].value
            Write-Host $_.matches.groups[1].value
        }

But I get nothing. Is there a way I can use just one long regex pattern to get the information I need? The information stays in the same format on every ticket that comes through.

How would I get the information after the [First Name]: and so on….

>Solution :

You can use

if ($incNotes -match '(?m)^\[First Name]: *(\S+)') {
    Write-Host $matches[1] 
}

See the regex demo. If you can have any kind of horizontal whitespace chars between : and the name, replace the space with [\p{Zs}\t], or some kind of [\s-[\r\n]].

Details:

(?m) – a RegexOptions.Multiline option that makes ^ match start of any line position, and $ match end of lines
^ – start of a line
\[First Name]: – a [First Name]: string
* – zero or more spaces
(\S+) – Capturing group 1: one or more non-whitespace chars (replace with \S.* or \S[^\n\r]* to match any text till end of string).

Note that -match is a case insensitive regex matching operator, use -cmatch if you need a case sensitive behavior. Also, it only finds the first match and $matches[1] returns the Group 1 value.