Powershell - Pulling string from txt, splitting it, then concatenating it for archive - string

Question

I have an application where I am getting a list of new\modified files from git status, then I take the incomplete strings from that file, concatenate them with the root dir file path, then move those files to an archive. I have it half working, but the nature of how I am using powershell does not provide error reports and the process is obviously erroring out. Here is the code I am trying to use. (It has gone through several iterations, please excuse the commented out portions) Basically I am trying to Get-Content from the txt file, then replace ? with \ (for some reason the process that creates the txt love forward slashes...), then split that string at the spaces. The only part of the string I am interested in is the last part, which I am trying to concatenate with the known working root directory, then I am attempting to move those to an archive location. Before you ask, this is something we are not willing to track in git, due to the nature of the files (they are test outputs that are time stamped, we want to save them on a per test run basis, not in git) I am still fairly new to powershell and have been banging my head against this rock for far too long.
Get-Content $outfile | Foreach-Object
{
#$_.Replace("/","\")
#$lineSplit = $_.Split(' ')
$_.Split(" ")
$filePath = "$repo_dir\$_[-1]"
$filePath.Replace('/','\')
"File Path Created: $filePath"
$untrackedLegacyTestFiles += $filePath
}
Get-Content $untrackedLegacyTestFiles | Foreach-Object
{
Copy-Item $_ $target_root -force
"Copying File: $_ to $target_root"
}
}
the $outfile is a text file where each line has a partial file path leading to a txt file generated by a test application we use. This info is provided by git, so it looks like this in the $outfile txt file:
!! Some/File/Path/Doc.txt
The "!!" mean git sees it as a new file, however it could be several characters from a " M" to "??". Which is why I am trying to split it on the spaces and take only the last element.
My desired output would be to take the the last element of the split string from the $outfile (Some/File/Path/Doc.txt) and concatenate it with the $repo_dir to form a complete file path, then move the Doc.txt to an archive location ($target_root).

Answer 1

To combine a path in PowerShell, you should use the Join-Path cmdlet. To extract the path from your string, you can use a regex:
$extractedPath = [regex]::Match('!! Some/File/Path/Doc.txt', '.*\s(.+)$').Groups[1].Value
$filePath = Join-Path $repo_dir $extractedPath
The Join-Path cmldet will also convert all forward slashes to backslashes so no need to replace them :-).
Your whole script could look like this:
Get-Content $outfile | Foreach-Object {
$path = Join-Path $repo_dir ([regex]::Match($_, '.*\s(.+)$').Groups[1].Value)
Copy-Item $path $target_root -force
}
If you don't like to use regexin your code, you can also extract the path using:
$extractedPath = '!! Some/File/Path/Doc.txt' -split ' ' | select -Last 1
or
$extractedPath = ('!! Some/File/Path/Doc.txt' -split ' ')[-1]