Difficulty escaping quote character in powershell script (Azure Devops Yaml)

Question

My azure piplines yaml script uses powershell to replace a placeholder string in a .CS file with the current date string. This is the line with the value to be replaced (20200101000000)

[assembly: MyCompany.Net.Attributes.BuildDateAttribute("20200101000000")]

This is the powershell step that does it

pwsh: (get-content -path $(versionFile)) | foreach-object {$_ -replace "20200101000000", (get-date -f 'yyyyMMddhhmmss')} | set-content -path $(versionFile)
  displayName: 'Update time stamp file'

I want to alter this step to include the quote characters " around the search string and write them into the new output value along with the new date. But I cannot seem to make that happen.

I mistakenly tried just putting escaped quote characters \" in the search and replace strings. But I guess you cannot escape inside of a single-quoted string so it did not work

pwsh: (get-content -path $(versionFile)) | foreach-object {$_ -replace "\"20200101000000\"", (get-date -f '\"yyyyMMddhhmmss\"')} | set-content -path $(versionFile)

This was the error:

##[command]"C:\Program Files\PowerShell\7\pwsh.exe" -NoLogo -NoProfile -NonInteractive -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Command ". 'D:\a\_temp\80625e52-1302-4e35-a799-223ab893bcf1.ps1'"
ParserError: D:\a\_temp\80625e52-1302-4e35-a799-223ab893bcf1.ps1:3
Line |
   3 |  … lyInfo.cs) | foreach-object {$_ -replace "\"20200101000000\"", (get-d …
     |                                                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
     | Unexpected token '20200101000000\""' in expression or statement.
##[error]PowerShell exited with code '1'.

I also tried to just using double quotes around the get-date part of the script so I could escape the quote characters but that doesn't seem to work either. I'm guessing that's a limitation of writing script this way.

Is there some other way to achieve what I want?

Mark Reed · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-03 19:09:30Z

3

The escape character in Powershell is backtick (`), not backslash (\). Try e.g. "`"20200101000000`"".

answered Nov 3, 2020 at 19:09

Mark Reed

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wp78de · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-03 19:07:03Z

1

You can use the Get-Date -UFormat instead to add arbitrary characters similar to the DateTime.ToString() function in .NET

'[Attrib("20200101000000")]' -replace '"20200101000000"', (get-date -UFormat '"%Y%m%d%H%M%S"')

answered Nov 3, 2020 at 19:07

wp78de

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