Here’s a question I see over and over and over again: “I have a string and I’m trying to split it on this part, but it’s jumbling it into a big mess. What’s going on?” Well, there’s splitting a string in PowerShell, and then there’s splitting a string in PowerShell. Confused? Let me explain.

Say you have this string for our example.

PS> $splitstring = 'this is an interesting string with the letters s and t all over the place'

Now let’s say you want to split it on all the “s” characters. You might do this and get these results.

PS> $splitstring.split('s')

thi
 i
 an intere
ting
tring with the letter

 and t all over the place

That did exactly what we thought it would. It took our string and broke it apart on all the “s”’s. Now, what if I want to split it where there’s an “st”? There’s only two spots it should split: the “st” in “interesting” and in “string”. Let’s try the same thing we tried before.

PS> $splitstring.split('st')


hi
 i
 an in
ere

ing

ring wi
h
he le

er

 and
 all over
he place

Well that ain’t right. What happened? If we look closely, we can see that our string was split anywhere that there was an “s” or a “t”, rather than where there was an “st” together.

.split() is a method that takes an array of characters and then splits the string anywhere it sees any of those characters.

-split is an operator that takes a pattern string (regular expression) and splits the string anywhere it sees that pattern.

Here’s what I should have done to split our string anywhere there’s an “st”.

PS> $splitstring -split 'st'

this is an intere
ing
ring with the letters s and t all over the place

That looks more like we’re expecting.

Remember, .split() takes an array of characters, -split takes a string.