PowerShell Replace CRLF in certain scenarios - file

Question

I'm new to PowerShell and wish to replace CRLF in some scenarios within a textfile.
An Example textfile will be:
Begin 1 2 3
End 1 2 3
List asd asd
Begin 1 2 3
End 1 2 3
Begin 1 2 3
End 1 2 3
Sometest asd asd
Begin 1 2 3
Where a line isn't starting with Begin or End, I wish to append that line onto the previous one.
So the desired outcome would be:
Begin 1 2 3
End 1 2 3 List asd asd
Begin 1 2 3
End 1 2 3
Begin 1 2 3
End 1 2 3 Sometest asd asd
Begin 1 2 3
The file is Tab Seperated. So after Begin and End, is a TAB.
I tried the below, just to get rid of all the CRLF's, which doesn't work:
$content = Get-Content c:\test.txt
$content -replace "'r'n","" | Set-Content c:\test2.txt
I've read the MSDN on PowerShell and can replace text on different lines, just not over multiple lines like this :(
I'm at home testing on Windows 7, but this is for work and will be on Vista.

Answer 1

# read the file
$content = Get-Content file.txt
# Create a new variable (array) to hold the new content
$newContent = #()
# loop over the file content
for($i=0; $i -lt $content.count; $i++)
{
# if the current line doesn't begin with 'begin' or 'end'
# append it to the last line םכ the new content variable
if($content[$i] -notmatch '^(begin|end)')
{
$newContent[-1] = $content[$i-1]+' '+$content[$i]
}
else
{
$newContent += $content[$i]
}
}
$newContent

Answer 2

What do you think about this one line ?
gc "beginend.txt" | % {}{if(($_ -match "^End")-or($_ -match "^Begin")){write-host "`n$_ " -nonewline}else{write-host $_ -nonewline}}{"`n"}
Begin 1 2 3
End 1 2 3 List asd asd
Begin 1 2 3
End 1 2 3
Begin 1 2 3
End 1 2 3 Sometest asd asd
Begin 1 2 3

Answer 3

$data = gc "beginend.txt"
$start = ""
foreach($line in $data) {
if($line -match "^(Begin|End)") {
if($start -ne "") {
write-output $start
}
$start = $line
} else {
$start = $start + " " + $line
}
}
# This last part is a bit of a hack. It picks up the last line
# if the last line begins with Begin or End. Otherwise, the loop
# above would skip the last line. Probably a more elegant way to
# do it :-)
if($data[-1] -match "^(Begin|End)") {
write-output $data[-1]
}