How to check if the array matches with specific string part in PowerShell?

Question

I am novice in PowerShell scripting and am working on a POC. I got stuck and am not able to proceed further, so I am posting my question on this site to get some ideas/answers.

The task is to compare an array of values with Regex. But I am failing to get the desired output. Here is the code I wrote till now:

 $array = @('MBS\FY16\11 May\Sirius Agreements\04 Build','MBS\FY16\11 May\Sirius Agreements\05 Build')
$values = 'MBS\FY16\11 May|MBS\FY16\12 Jan'
$Splitvalues = $values.Split('|')
[regex]$Regex = ‘(?i)^(‘ + (($Splitvalues | % {[regex]::escape($_)}) –join “|”) + ‘)$’

 if($array -match $Regex)
 {
    echo "Matched"
 }
 else
 {
    echo "notmatched"
 }`

The requirement is to match with either of them from $Values. So I am splitting them with a pipe and later creating a Regex with both array values.

When I compare with the actual array of values $array, it's failing. It is always going to the else part.

I am thinking when we use regex to match, it'll return true if the exact word matches with the source values. Or maybe I am using the wrong regex.

I just need to match only the exact part values either " MBS\\FY16\\11 May " or " MBS\\FY16\\12 June " and return the matched value or a message.

How do I solve this issue?

Answer 1

You don't need to create a new [regex] object in order to use the -match operator:

$ValuesToFind = 'MBS\FY16\11 May','MBS\FY16\12 Jan'
$MatchPattern = ($ValuesToFind |%{ [regex]::Escape($_) }) -join '|'

Now, when you apply -match to an array, all matching items in the array will be returned, which sounds like a perfectly good result from your question.

Thus, you can simplify the entire thing to:

$Array        = 'MBS\FY16\11 May\Sirius Agreements\04 Build','MBS\FY16\11 May\Sirius Agreements\05 Build'
$ValuesToFind = 'MBS\FY16\11 May','MBS\FY16\12 Jan'

$MatchPattern = ($ValuesToFind |%{ [regex]::Escape($_) }) -join '|'

$Array -match $MatchPattern