How can I modify this PowerShell script to continue looking for one string after another? - string

Question

I want this power shell script to search for the occurrence of multiple strings, one after the other, and to append the results in a .txt file.
Currently I am specifying the string that I want to look for, waiting for the script to finish looking for that string and transferring the results into a spreadsheet. This is taking a lot of time as I have to keep specifying the string I want to look for, especially since there are well over 100 that I need to look for.
#ERROR REPORTING ALL
Set-StrictMode -Version latest
$path = "C:\Users\username\Documents\FileName"
$files = Get-Childitem $path -Include *.docx,*.doc,*.ppt, *.xls,
*.xlsx, *.pptx, *.eap -Recurse | Where-Object { !($_.psiscontainer) }
$output =
"C:\Users\username\Documents\FileName\wordfiletry.txt"
$application = New-Object -comobject word.application
$application.visible = $False
$findtext = "First_String"
Function getStringMatch
{
# Loop through all *.doc files in the $path directory
Foreach ($file In $files)
{
$document = $application.documents.open($file.FullName,$false,$true)
$range = $document.content
$wordFound = $range.find.execute($findText)
if($wordFound)
{
"$file.fullname has found the string called $findText and it is
$wordfound" | Out-File $output -Append
}
}
$document.close()
$application.quit()
}
getStringMatch
This script will look for 'First_String' successfully, I was hoping to be able to specify 'Second_String', 'Third_String' etc rather than replace First_String every time.

Answer 1

As an alternative to the suggestion from #Mathias, you could use Regex to query the document text instead.
Read the context of the document as a string $text = $document.content.text and then use Select-String $findtext -AllMatches to evaluate the matches with $findtext as string representation of a regular expression instead.
Example:
# pipe delimited string as a regular expression
$findtext = "First_String|Second_String|Third_String"
Function getStringMatch
{
# Loop through all *.doc files in the $path directory
Foreach ($file In $files)
{
$document = $application.documents.open($file.FullName,$false,$true)
$text = $document.content.text
$result = $text | Select-String $findtext -AllMatches
if($result)
{
"$file.fullname has found the strings called $($result.Matches.Value) at indexes $($result.Matches.Index)" | Out-File $output -Append
}
}
$document.close()
$application.quit()
}
Note that if you're trying find strings that do have reserved regex character, you'll need to escape them first