I was recently parsing strings which contained a wildcard pattern in the string name, by using the ‘WildCardPattern.Escape’ method I was able to convert the string which contained the escaped characters to a string that contains the escape codes and then parse the output as expected.
In the example, I was attempting to retrieve the datastore name of objects returned from the ‘Extensiondata.Layoutex.File’ property using PowerCLI. Where an example of the string is as below:
[DATASTORE 1] vm1/vm1.vmx
I was able to pass the property value to the ‘WildcardPattern.Escape’ method to convert the string containing the escape codes.
$Wildcard = [Management.Automation.WildcardPattern]::Escape($File.Name)
I was then able to parse the output to retrieve the datastore name from the Name property of the file.
$Datastore = $Wilcard.Split("`[")[1]).Split("``]")[0]
After invoking the ‘WildcardPattern.Escape’ method and parsing the output, we would receive a value as below:
DATASTORE 1
For more information on the ‘WildcardPattern.Escape’ method see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.management.automation.wildcardpattern.escape(v=vs.85).aspx
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