I have the following PowerShell:
$img="john.smith.jpg"
$img.Replace(".", "")
I'm trying to replace the first occurrence of a a period in the string.
At the moment it replaces all periods and returns: "johnsmithjpg"
The output I'm looking for is: "johnsmith.jpg".
I also tried the following but it doesn't work:
$img="john.smith.jpg"
[regex]$pattern = "."
$img.replace($img, "", 1)
What do I need to do to get it to only replace the first period?
From Replacing only the first occurrence of a word in a string:
$img = "john.smith.jpg"
[regex]$pattern = "\."
$img = $pattern.replace($img, "", 1)
Output:
Note for the pattern, . is treated as a wildcard character in regex, so you need to escape it with \
Other possibility without RegEx
$img="john.smith.jpg"
$img.Remove($img.IndexOf("."),1)
Seems to me that $img contains a filename including the extension. By blindly replacing the first dot, you might end up with unusable (file)names.
For instance, if you have $img = 'johnsmith.jpg' (so the first and only dot there is part of the extension), you may end up with johnsmithjpg..
If $img is obtained via the Name property of a FileInfo object (like Get-Item or Get-ChildItem produces),
change to:
$theFileInfoObject = Get-Item -Path 'Path\To\johnsmith.jpg' # with or without dot in the BaseName
$img = '{0}{1}' -f (($theFileInfoObject.BaseName -split '\.', 2) -join ''), $theFileInfoObject.Extension
# --> 'johnsmith.jpg'
Or use .Net:
$img = "johnsmith.jpg" # with or without dot in the BaseName
$img = '{0}{1}' -f (([IO.Path]::GetFileNameWithoutExtension($img) -split '\.', 2) -join ''), [IO.Path]::GetExtension($img)
# --> 'johnsmith.jpg'
.is not being escaped for the regular expression context (in which case it represents a wildcard character).