Using a Regular Expression to Find Phone Numbers in all Files of a File Share

Question

I have another issue just whipping me. I borrowed the following code (I can't recall from where) that looked super promising for determining phone numbers present in all files in a file share. The code absolutely makes sense to me, and that is why I am confused why it is not working. I test it with a document that I created in which I placed a phone number. It returned nothing. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

foreach ($file in Get-ChildItem -Recurse  | Select-String -pattern '^\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}' | Select-Object -Unique Path) {$file.path}

Could you provide the contents of the file? – Kewl Mar 29 '17 at 12:12 — Kewl, Mar 29 '17 at 12:12
No. It provided nothing. – Athanasius12 Mar 29 '17 at 12:53 — Athanasius12, Mar 29 '17 at 12:53

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 29 '17 at 12:15

1

The problem is most likely that the

^\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}

regex requires the phone number to be first characters in a document (or a line) while in the actual documents it may be somewhere in the middle.

Change the ^ anchor to \b (word boundary). You may also want to add this word boundary anchor after the potential phone number:

\b\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}\b

answered Mar 29 '17 at 12:15

Dmitry Egorov

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Thank you! I will try this. – Athanasius12 Mar 29 '17 at 12:53
Ugh...no, it still didn't work. I am returning nothing at all. – Athanasius12 Mar 29 '17 at 17:31
Then provide a file sample, please. – Dmitry Egorov Mar 29 '17 at 18:50
Okay, so I got it to work. The only problem now is that it ONLY picks up the .txt documents that contain the numbers. I did it by testing for social security numbers this time: – Athanasius12 Mar 30 '17 at 19:42
here is what I used: foreach ($file in Get-ChildItem -Recurse -filter | Select-String -pattern '[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{4}' -allmatches | Select-Object -Unique Path) {$file.path} – Athanasius12 Mar 30 '17 at 19:43
So, I would like to know why it isn't picking up .docx which contains those numbers. Thanks for any help! – Athanasius12 Mar 30 '17 at 20:58

Using a Regular Expression to Find Phone Numbers in all Files of a File Share

1 Answers1