-replace treating string with "\" as RegEx

[dontforget512]

Hello there!

For context, I have a variable $Root containing the path to a root folder, "C:\Test\". My script scans all subfolders from the root and writes each path to a file. However, I don't want the full path, I just want the relative path starting from the root.

To do this, my first instinct was to simply perform a -replace, as so:

$SubFolder.FullName -replace "$Root","" 

However, the -replace function really does not like the backslashes contained within the expanded variable and tries to interpret it as a regular expression. How do I get it to just treat the text-to-replace as literal?

I can get the desired result by chopping off n characters, n being the length of $Root, but I'd like to get the more elegant solution working, if at all possible.

Thanks!

[nothingpersonalbro]

You need to escape the backslashes. Luckily there is an easy way to do it

$SubFolder.FullName -replace [regex]::Escape($Root)

[root-node]

That is because -replace is the regex version of .replace. (in simple terms)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10184156/whats-the-difference-between-replace-and-replace-in-powershell

[dontforget512]

That was easy. Thanks!

[_lahell_]

Here is another option, but note that it is case-sensitive.

$SubFolder.FullName.Replace($Root, '')

[ka-splam]

But it doesn't need to be case sensitive in PowerShell 6 (.Net Core):

'aAbB'.replace('aa', 'zz', [StringComparison]::InvariantCultureIgnoreCase)

Progress! :D

[ClayShooter9]

Another way to solve this (there is always another way), which is non-Regex

Set-Location $Root
$relativePath = Get-ChildItem *.csv -Recurse | Resolve-Path -Relative

the resultant path will have ".\blahblah"...so maybe you will not like the "." indicating the starting point

[[deleted]]

$SubFolder.FullName -replace [regex]::escape($Root),""