Character classes

A character class is used to match a single character to a set of possible characters. A character class is denoted using square brackets ([ ]).For example, a character class may contain each of the vowels:

PS> 'get' -match 'g[aeiou]t'
True
PS> 'got' -match 'g[aeiou]t' 
True
PS> 'gxt' -match 'g[aeiou]t'
False

Within a character class, the special or reserved characters are as follows:

• -: Used to define a range
• \: Escape character
• ^: Negates the character class

A character class can be used to define a range of characters.

Ranges

A hyphen is used to define a range of characters, for example, to capture any number of characters repeated one or more times in a set (using +):

PS> '1st place' -match '[0-9]+'    # $matches[0] is "1"
True
PS> '23rd place' -match '[0-9]+'   # $matches[0] is "23"
True

A range in a character class can be...