How to split string by string in Powershell

Question

I'm trying to spit the string with a delimiter, which is a string:

$string = "5637144576, messag<>est<<>>5637145326, 1<<>>5637145328, 0"
$separator = "<<>>"
$string.Split($separator)

As the result of splitting I get:

5637144576, messag

est



5637145326, 1



5637145328, 0

Instead of

5637144576, messag<>est
5637145326, 1
5637145328, 0

When I try to use overloaded split which accepts string[]:

$string = "5637144576, messag<>est<<>>5637145326, 1<<>>5637145328, 0"
$separator = @("<<>>")
$string.Split($separator)

But I get next error:

Cannot convert argument "0", with value: "System.Object[]", for "Split" to type "System.Char[]": "Cannot convert value "<<>>" to type "System.Char". Error: "String must be exactly one character long.""

Does someone knows how to split string by string?

Answer 1

The -split operator uses the string to split, instead of a chararray like Split():

$string = "5637144576, messag<>est<<>>5637145326, 1<<>>5637145328, 0"
$separator = "<<>>"
$string -split $separator

5637144576, messag<>est
5637145326, 1
5637145328, 0

If you want to use the Split() method with a string, you need the $seperator to be a stringarray with one element, and also specify a stringsplitoptions value. You can see this by checking its definition:

$string.Split

OverloadDefinitions                                                                                
-------------------                                                                                
string[] Split(Params char[] separator)                                                            
string[] Split(char[] separator, int count)                                                        
string[] Split(char[] separator, System.StringSplitOptions options)                                
string[] Split(char[] separator, int count, System.StringSplitOptions options)                     

#This one
string[] Split(string[] separator, System.StringSplitOptions options)      
string[] Split(string[] separator, int count, System.StringSplitOptions options)


$string = "5637144576, messag<>est<<>>5637145326, 1<<>>5637145328, 0"
$separator = [string[]]@("<<>>")
$string.Split($separator, [System.StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries)

5637144576, messag<>est
5637145326, 1
5637145328, 0

EDIT: As @RomanKuzmin pointed out, -split splits using regex-patterns by default. So be aware to escape special characters (ex. . which in regex is "any character"). You could also force simplematch to disable regex-matching like:

$separator = "<<>>"
$string -split $separator, 0, "simplematch"

Read more about -split here.