Common regex patterns in PowerShell - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Common regex patterns

📖 Scenario: You work in IT support and often need to check if user inputs match common patterns like email addresses, phone numbers, or postal codes.

🎯 Goal: Build a PowerShell script that uses common regex patterns to find matches in given text samples.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create variables with sample text strings

Define regex pattern variables for email, phone number, and postal code

Use the -match operator with the regex patterns to check for matches

Print the results clearly showing which pattern matched

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

IT support and automation scripts often need to validate user input like emails or phone numbers to ensure data quality.

💼 Career

Knowing common regex patterns and how to apply them in scripts is useful for system administrators, support engineers, and automation specialists.

1

Create sample text variables

Create three variables called $emailSample, $phoneSample, and $postalSample with these exact string values: '[e-mail]', '123-456-7890', and '90210' respectively.

PowerShell

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use = to assign the exact strings to the variables.

2

Define regex pattern variables

Create three variables called $emailPattern, $phonePattern, and $postalPattern with these exact regex strings: '^[\w.-]+@[\w.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}$' for email, '^\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}$' for phone number, and '^\d{5}$' for postal code.

PowerShell

$emailSample = '[e-mail]'
$phoneSample = '123-456-7890'
$postalSample = '90210'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use single quotes and escape backslashes properly in regex strings.

3

Check matches using regex patterns

Use the -match operator with variables $emailSample, $phoneSample, and $postalSample against $emailPattern, $phonePattern, and $postalPattern respectively. Store the boolean results in variables $emailMatch, $phoneMatch, and $postalMatch.

PowerShell

$emailSample = '[e-mail]'
$phoneSample = '123-456-7890'
$postalSample = '90210'
$emailPattern = '^[\w.-]+@[\w.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}$'
$phonePattern = '^\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}$'
$postalPattern = '^\d{5}$'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use -match to test if the sample matches the pattern and assign the result to the match variables.

4

Print the match results

Print the values of $emailMatch, $phoneMatch, and $postalMatch each on a new line using Write-Output.

PowerShell

$emailSample = '[e-mail]'
$phoneSample = '123-456-7890'
$postalSample = '90210'
$emailPattern = '^[\w.-]+@[\w.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}$'
$phonePattern = '^\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}$'
$postalPattern = '^\d{5}$'
$emailMatch = $emailSample -match $emailPattern
$phoneMatch = $phoneSample -match $phonePattern
$postalMatch = $postalSample -match $postalPattern
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use Write-Output to print each match result on its own line.