Regular Expressions in powershell split

Question

I need to strip out a UNC fqdn name down to just the name or IP depending on the input.

My examples would be

\\tom.overflow.corp.com
\\123.43.234.23.overflow.corp.com

I want to end up with just tom or 123.43.234.23

I have the following code in my array which is striping out the domain name perfect, but Im still left with \\tom

-Split '\.(?!\d)')[0]

Answer 1

Your regex succeeds in splitting off the tokens of interest in principle, but it doesn't account for the leading \\ in the input strings.

You can use regex alternation (|) to include the leading \\ at the start as an additional -split separator.

Given that matching a separator at the very start of the input creates an empty element with index 0, you then need to access index 1 to get the substring of interest.

In short: The regex passed to -split should be '^\\\\|\.(?!\d)' instead of '\.(?!\d)', and the index used to access the resulting array should be [1] instead of [0]:

'\\tom.overflow.corp.com', '\\123.43.234.23.overflow.corp.com' | 
  ForEach-Object { ($_ -Split '^\\\\|\.(?!\d)')[1] }

The above yields:

tom
123.43.234.23

---

Alternatively, you could remove the leading \\ in a separate step, using -replace:

'\\tom.overflow.corp.com', '\\123.43.234.23.overflow.corp.com' | 
  ForEach-Object { ($_ -Split '\.(?!\d)')[0] -replace '^\\\\' }

---

Yet another alternative is to use a single -replace operation, which does not require a ForEach-Object call (doesn't require explicit iteration):

'\\tom.overflow.corp.com', '\\123.43.234.23.overflow.corp.com' -replace
  '?(x) ^\\\\ (.+?) \.\D .+', '$1'

• Inline option (?x) (IgnoreWhiteSpace) allows you to make regexes more readable with insignificant whitespace: any unescaped whitespace can be used for visual formatting.

• ^\\\\ matches the \\ (escaped with \) at the start (^) of each string.

• (.+?) matches one or more characters lazily.

• \.\D matches a literal . followed by something other than a digit (\d matches a digit, \D is the negation of that).

• .+ matches one or more remaining characters, i.e., the rest of the input.

• $1 as the replacement operand refers to what the 1st capture group ((...)) in the regex matched, and, given that the regex was designed to consume the entire string, replaces it with just that.

Answer 2

I'm stealing Lee_Daileys $InSTuff but appending a RegEx I used recently

$InStuff = -split @'
\\tom.overflow.corp.com
\\123.43.234.23.overflow.corp.com
'@
$InStuff |ForEach-Object {($_.Trim('\\') -split '\.(?!\d{1,3}(\.|$))')[0]}

Sample Output:

tom
123.43.234.23

As you can see here on RegEx101 the dots between the numbers are not matched