Powershell - Split a string

Question

I'm trying to split a string in power-shell... I've already done some work on the string, but i can't figure out this last part.

Say I'm sitting with this string:

This is a string. Its a comment that's anywhere from 5 to 250 characters wide.

I want to split it at the 30 character mark, but I don't want to split a word. If I was to split it, it would have "... commen" on one line... "t that..." on the next line.

What's a graceful way of splitting the string, 50max, without breaking a word in half? Say for simplicity sake a word is a space (comments might have numeric text "$1.00" in it as well. Don't want to split that in half either).

Lee · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-27 14:56:21Z

7

$regex = [regex] "\b"
$str = "This is a string. Its a comment that's anywhere from 5 to 250 characters wide."
$split = $regex.split($str, 2, 30)

answered Aug 27, 2012 at 14:56

Lee

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2 Comments

Daniel Love Jr Over a year ago

So what is this doing here exactly?

Lee Over a year ago

@DanielLoveJr - The code uses this overload of Regex.Split so it splits the input string into a maximum of two pieces on the first word boundary (the \b regex) starting from the 31st character.

Rob Wiley · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-27 22:41:02Z

0

Not sure how graceful it is, but one way to do it would be to use lastindexof on a substring 30 characters long to find your largest, sub 30 character value.

$str = "This is a string. Its a comment that's anywhere from 5 to 250 characters wide."
$thirtychars = $str.substring(0,30)
$sen1 = $str.substring(0,$thirtychars.lastindexof(" ")+1)
$sen2 = $str.substring($thirtychars.lastindexof(" "))

answered Aug 27, 2012 at 22:41

Rob Wiley

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Comments

naugiedoggie · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-29 01:31:22Z

0

Assuming that the "words" are tokens that are space delimited.

$str = "This is a string. Its a comment that's anywhere from 5 to 250 characters wide."
$q = New-Object System.Collections.Generic.Queue[String] (,[string[]]$str.Split(" "));
$newstr = ""; while($newstr.length -lt 30){$newstr += $q.deQueue()+" "}

Tokenize the string (split on spaces), which creates an array. Creating the Queue object with the array in the constructor, automatically populates the queue; then, you just "pop" the items off the queue until the length of the new string is as close as it can get to the limit.

Note the quaint syntax ,[string[]]$str.Split(" ") to make the constructor work properly.

mp

answered Aug 29, 2012 at 1:31

naugiedoggie

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