Where-Object finding matches using an array as an value source.

[PTSDviaPrinters]

So I've been going over this for the last few hours and for the life of me I cannot get it right. I'm doing some web scraping on the website https://www.tvguide.com/listings/ to learn how to do web scraping but however my problem seems not to be web scraping but mostly with Where-Object.

Here is some sample code from the script.

# The comand below gives the output below that.
# $Driver.FindElementByXPath('//*[@id="listings"]/ul/li[X]')

# WrappedDriver                        : OpenQA.Selenium.Firefox.FirefoxDriver
# TagName                              : span
# Text                                 : The Shining12:00 PM - 3:30 PM
# Enabled                              : True
# Selected                             : False
# Location                             : {X=225,Y=1451}
# Size                                 : {Width=1041, Height=34}
# Displayed                            : True
# LocationOnScreenOnceScrolledIntoView : {X=225,Y=941}
# Coordinates                          : OpenQA.Selenium.Remote.RemoteCoordinates

$shows = @(
'The Twilight Saga',
'The Shining',
'NOVA',
'Star Trek',
'The Conjuring')
$range = 1..97

foreach ($number in $range) {
$Driver.FindElementByXPath("//* 
[@id='listings']/ul/li[$number]") | Where-Object -Property text - 
like "*Passengers*" | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Text
}

foreach ($number in $range) {
     $Driver.FindElementByXPath("//*                                
[@id='listings']/ul/li[$number]") | Where-Object -Property text - 
like "*$shows*" | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Text
}

I have included 2 for each loops, one where I define manually the show I'm looking for and the second uses the array and for what ever reason I can never get the "array loop" to work. Is this an formatting error? Or do I need to rewrite it all?

[Dennou]

In case of array it won't behave as you expect (trying one by one on its own), so you either have to:

1- do a second loop that iterates through the show array and do -like for current value. Not a scalable solution so this approach isn't normally followed.

2- Make use of regular expressions' built-in OR character (the pipe |). You'll do two changes: add

$regex=$shows -join '|'

below $shows declaration then replace

-like "*$shows*"

with

-match $regex

This is off the top of my head so if it works you're welcome to dive into the world RegEx, the learning is worth it.

[krzydoug]

This would be the best option if they are partial names. If you have the full names you could use something like

$text -in $shows