How to do case-sensitive find & replace in Excel file with Powershell - excel

Question

I want to use Powershell to find special characters (like Greek letters) in an Excel document and replace them with HTML entities. My script looks like this:
$file = "C:\Path\To\File\test.xls"
$xl = New-Object -ComObject Excel.Application
$xl.Visible = $True
$objWorkbook = $xl.Workbooks.Open($file)
$objWorksheet = $objWorkbook.Worksheets.Item(1)
$objRange = $objWorksheet.UsedRange
$charArray = #(
([char]948, "δ"),
([char]916, "Δ")
)
foreach ($char in $charArray){
$FindText = $char[0]
$ReplaceText = $char[1]
if ($objRange.find("$FindText")) {
$objRange.replace("$FindText", $ReplaceText)
} else {write-host "Didn't find $FindText"}
}
The trouble is, the .find() and .replace() methods are not case-sensitive, so [char]948 (δ) matches both the lowercase delta (δ) and uppercase delta (Δ) characters. The result is that all δ and Δ characters in the Excel (.xls) file are replaced with δ.
In VBA, Range.Find() has a MatchCase parameter, but it does not seem that Powershell allows it. For example, $objRange.find("$FindText", MatchCase:=$True) does not work.
I also tried Powershell's -cmatch and -creplace commands, which are case-sensitive, but I could not figure out how to get those to work on the Excel range object $objRange:
$objRange -creplace "$FindText", $ReplaceText has no effect on the Excel file.
I can't export or convert the data to .txt or .csv because the special characters don't survive the conversion.
Is there a way to make this work?

Answer 1

Using PowerShell you can use creplace operator
"aAaAaA" -creplace 'a','I'
IAIAIA
To replace find you can use the IndexOf method from the string class it takes a comparisonType
IndexOf(string value, int startIndex, int count, System.StringComparison comparisonType)
Example :
"Jean Paul".indexOF("paul", 0, [System.StringComparison]::CurrentCulture)
-1
"Jean Paul".indexOF("paul", 0, [System.StringComparison]::CurrentCultureIgnoreCase)
5