{"id":15161,"date":"2011-03-23T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-23T00:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/heyscriptingguy\/2011\/03\/23\/use-powershell-to-look-for-phone-numbers-in-text\/"},"modified":"2011-03-23T00:01:00","modified_gmt":"2011-03-23T00:01:00","slug":"use-powershell-to-look-for-phone-numbers-in-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/use-powershell-to-look-for-phone-numbers-in-text\/","title":{"rendered":"Use PowerShell to Look for Phone Numbers in Text"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary<\/b>: The Scripting Wife learns how to use a regular expression pattern to look for phone numbers in text files.<\/p>\n

Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, here. I am looking over some of the slide decks from the Columbia, South Carolina SQL Saturday #70 event. There were a couple of really good Windows PowerShell sessions during the day (including the one that I presented on Windows PowerShell Best Practices for database administrators (DBAs). <\/p>\n

I am midway through Brian K. McDonald’s SQL Reporting presentation deck, and I sense the presence of another person in my office. I am careful not to move my head, but I look out of the corner of my eye. Sure enough, it is the Scripting Wife (but then, we are the only two in the house—but it could have been a poltergeist). I decide I will wait to see what she says. Silence begins to fill the room like pine needles covering a fresh cut lawn. Finally, I break down.<\/p>\n

“Hello. What are you up to?” I ask.<\/p>\n

“You know how yesterday you showed me how to pick out specific lines in a text file. I thought that would work for me, but I guess I mixed up some of the lines in my text files. I need a better way to find things like the telephone numbers in my files,” she said.<\/p>\n

“I have a great way to do that very thing. But it will involve extending our lesson on regular expressions from Sunday<\/a>,” I said.<\/p>\n

“What do you mean extend our lesson?” she asked.<\/p>\n

“Well on Sunday, I taught you the caret (^<\/b>) special character, which tells the regular expression to begin matching at the beginning of the line. The best way to match a telephone number is to use another special character— the backslash d<\/b>,” I said. <\/p>\n

“I see,” she said with a bit of reluctance.<\/p>\n

“It is easy. Create a variable named a<\/b>, and then assign a bogus telephone number to it. Then use the match<\/b> operator to match caret backslash d<\/b>,” I instructed.<\/p>\n

The Scripting Wife thought for a minute, and typed the following commands (<space> is the Space bar, <enter> is the Enter key or Return key).<\/p>\n

\n

$a<space>=<space>”123-123-1234″<enter><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

$a<space>-match<space>’^\\d'<enter><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The following is her command and the associated output.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

“So you see, my dear Scripting Wife, that regular expression pattern finds a match with the bogus phone number. Use Select-String<\/b> to see if it finds Lori’s phone number,” I said.<\/p>\n

“OK,” she said.<\/p>\n

The Scripting Wife thought for a second or two, and then cautiously typed the following command.<\/p>\n

\n

Select-String -Path C:\\MyFriends\\Lori.txt -Pattern ‘^\\d’<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The command and its associated output are shown here.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

“Well that almost worked,” she said. “Why do I also have Lori’s street address?”<\/p>\n

“That is because the caret backslash d<\/b> regular expression matches any line that begins with a number. In your Lori.txt file there are two lines that begin with numbers,” I said. The Lori.txt file <\/a>is shown here.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

“What we need to do now is modify the regular expression pattern so that it will only match three numbers, add a dash and three more numbers, and then add another dash followed by four numbers. To do this, you need to learn how to say three numbers. You put the number 3 inside a set of curly brackets. Go ahead and try that,” I said.<\/p>\n

The Scripting Wife thought for a little bit, used the Up arrow to retrieve her previous command, and modified it with {3}<\/b>. She also added the dashes to separate the different number groups. The command she created appears here.<\/p>\n

\n

Select-String -Path C:\\MyFriends\\Lori.txt -Pattern ‘^\\d{3}-\\d{3}-\\d{4}’<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When she ran the command, the output shown here appeared.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

“Wow, did I do that?” the Scripting Wife said, amazed at her progress.<\/p>\n

“Indeed you did,” I said, somewhat pleased with both myself and with her.<\/p>\n

“It looks really complicated, but it is actually pretty simple in small pieces,” she said. “Thank you.”<\/p>\n

And with that she was gone. Who knows where she was headed… <\/p>\n

I invite you to follow me on Twitter<\/a> and Facebook<\/a>. If you have any questions, send email to me at scripter@microsoft.com<\/a>, or post your questions on the Official Scripting Guys Forum<\/a>. See you tomorrow. Until then, peace.<\/p>\n

Ed Wilson, Microsoft Scripting Guy<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summary: The Scripting Wife learns how to use a regular expression pattern to look for phone numbers in text files. Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, here. I am looking over some of the slide decks from the Columbia, South Carolina SQL Saturday #70 event. There were a couple of really good Windows PowerShell sessions during […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":595,"featured_media":87096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[38,51,174,3,4,74,45],"class_list":["post-15161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scripting","tag-files","tag-getting-started","tag-regular-expressions","tag-scripting-guy","tag-scripting-techniques","tag-scripting-wife","tag-windows-powershell"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Summary: The Scripting Wife learns how to use a regular expression pattern to look for phone numbers in text files. Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, here. I am looking over some of the slide decks from the Columbia, South Carolina SQL Saturday #70 event. There were a couple of really good Windows PowerShell sessions during […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/595"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}