Truncating url in Powershell

Question

Powershell:

Help: I want to truncate this url:

https://thoudamchitaranjan.blogspot.in/2017/12/merry-christmas-and-still-merry-shes-still-so-beautiful.html

into this:

 merry-christmas-and-still-merry-shes-still-so-beautiful

and store it into a variable.

I tried wildcards but wouldn't work. I tried replacing "/" with newline "`n" and tried reading the last line. Also I successfully tried the code below. The code that i used and worked is:

$rightPart="https://thoudamchitaranjan.blogspot.in/2017/12/merry-christmas-and-still-merry-shes-still-so-beautiful.html"
$rightPart=$rightPart.Replace(".html","")
while($rightPart -imatch "/"){
$pos = $rightPart.IndexOf("/")
$rightPart = $rightPart.Substring($pos+1)
}
Write-Output "String is: $rightPart"

But i want a better way. Thanks for your help in advance.

Ricc Babbitt · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-20 07:55:55Z

3

Instead of doing string parsing acrobatics, you can interrogate the URL with the URI Class in combination with using the FileInfo constructor to get the basename of the document.

$url = "https://thoudamchitaranjan.blogspot.in/2017/12/merry-christmas-and-still-merry-shes-still-so-beautiful.html"

([IO.FileInfo]([System.Uri]$url).Segments[-1]).BaseName

What is nice about this is that it will get the last filename in the URL no matter if it ends with .htm/.html/.asp/.aspx/etc and whether you have one slash "/" or 20.

Another way is to use Split-Path and grab the leaf object in combination with grabbing the BaseName of the FileInfo object.

([IO.FileInfo](Split-Path $url -Leaf)).BaseName

answered Jan 20, 2018 at 7:55

Ricc Babbitt

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1 Comment

thoudamchitaranjan Over a year ago

That's certainly beautiful. That came out of nowhere, yet so elegant. I never thought it could be done. Now I know it could be done. Thank you for this beautiful tip.

Iggy Zofrin · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-20 05:11:20Z

1

you mean something like this?

$url = 'https://thoudamchitaranjan.blogspot.in/2017/12/merry-christmas-and-still-merry-shes-still-so-beautiful.html'
$arr = $url -split '/'
$truncatedVar = ($arr[$arr.Length-1]).Substring(0, $arr[$arr.Length-1].IndexOf('.'))

answered Jan 20, 2018 at 5:11

Iggy Zofrin

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2 Comments

thoudamchitaranjan Over a year ago

Yup, that was it. That was definitely shorter code. Thank you very much.

Esperento57 Over a year ago

Else you can do it too : $arr=($url -split '/')[-1] ; $arr=$arr.Substring(0, $arr.IndexOf('.'))

veefu · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-20 08:00:31Z

1

You can also use regular expressions with the -replace operator.

$url = 'https://thoudamchitaranjan.blogspot.in/2017/12/merry-christmas-and-still-merry-shes-still-so-beautiful.html'
$truncatedVar = $url -replace ".*/(.*)\.html",'$1'

.*/ matches zero or more of any character up to the last slash

(.*)\.html matches zero or more of any character up to the .html string. The parenthesis cause all matched text to be captured to a variable.

'$1' is the second argument to the -replace operator, telling it what to replace the matched text with. In this case $1 evaluates to the text that was captured by (.*)

/edited to fix the double-quotes, also escaped the '.' in .html

edited Jan 20, 2018 at 8:00

answered Jan 20, 2018 at 6:30

veefu

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5 Comments

thoudamchitaranjan Over a year ago

i just ran the code. It looks like the whole $url is getting replaced with a null value. $1 seems to contain nothing.

veefu Over a year ago

Sorry, I accidentally replaced single-quotes with double-quotes on the '$1' parameter. When in double-quotes, powershell tries to evaluate the $1 variable within the double-quotes, which does, indeed, result in nothing.

thoudamchitaranjan Over a year ago

Ok. That solved it. I was still looking for where it went wrong. This format is still so much shorter than all. Thank you.

veefu Over a year ago

Regular expressions are worth learning. Many languages have native support for them.

thoudamchitaranjan Over a year ago

I agree. I like the wildcard formatting for the string. Thats very special. Again, thank you. :)

Esperento57 · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-20 10:50:15Z

1

Just do it:

$URL="https://thoudamchitaranjan.blogspot.in/2017/12/merry-christmas-and-still-merry-shes-still-so-beautiful.html"
[System.IO.Path]::GetFileNameWithoutExtension($URL)

edited Jan 20, 2018 at 10:50

answered Jan 20, 2018 at 10:05

Esperento57

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2 Comments

thoudamchitaranjan Over a year ago

Thank you. This definitely is useful for my other problem when I want to get the file name of a file. However, for the current problem, it returns: "merry-christmas-and-still-merry-shes-still-so-beautiful.html" hence, I ll have to truncate the ".html" in a different statement.

thoudamchitaranjan Over a year ago

It works. I really didn't think that IO.Path will allow me to work with urls, but it does work, and its a wonder i guess. Maybe, its because linux uses front-slashes for paths. Its a neat cheat. Thanks again.

mklement0 · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-20 13:55:37Z

1

To complement Ricc Babbitt's helpful answer:

PowerShell Core - but, unfortunately, not Windows PowerShell - supports Split-Path -LeafBase, which allows extraction of the base filename (the filename without extension) in a single operation:

# PowerShell *Core* only
PS> Split-Path -LeafBase "https://example.org/shes-still-so-beautiful.html"
shes-still-so-beautiful

answered Jan 20, 2018 at 13:55

mklement0

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