PowerShell is powerful enough to perform the File Explorer operations, such as copying, moving, renaming, or deleting a file. It can read and replace the content inside a text file, whether a string or a single word. Particularly, PowerShell has such commands that can be employed to read and replace every instance of a string.

This tutorial will demonstrate a couple of methods to resolve the mentioned query.

How to Replace Every Instance of a String in a File by Utilizing PowerShell?

These approaches can be employed to fix the stated query:

• Get-Content and Set-Content.
• IO.File.

Method 1: Utilize the “Get-Content” and “Set-Content” Methods in Order to Replace Each Instance of a String in a Document File

This approach first uses the “Get-Content” cmdlet to retrieve the data inside the file and then uses the “Set-Content” cmdlet to replace or write the new occurrence or content. Particularly, the “-Replace” parameter is used to replace the instance of a string in a file.

Take a look at the given example to get a thorough understanding of it.

Example

First of all, let’s check the file version before replacing every occurrence. For that reason, execute the “Get-Content” cmdlet alongside the file path:

Now, let’s replace the word “Cat” with the “Dog”:

According to the above command:

• Firstly, we used the “Get-Content” cmdlet alongside the file path within the inverted command.
• Next, we added the “-Replace” parameter and specified two words separated by a comma, where the first word will be replaced with the second one.
• Then, the pipeline “|” is utilized to transfer the output to the “Set-Content” cmdlet as an input.
• Finally, this cmdlet is used alongside the file path to confirm the replacement of the string in a file:

For the verification, again, get the content of the selected file:

It can be observed that the word “Cat” has been replaced with “Dog” successfully.

Method 2: Use the “System.IO.File” Method to Replace Each Occurrence/Instance of a String in a File

Microsoft’s .Net class “File” is specifically used to manage the File Explorer. Particularly, it plays a vital role in replacing the instance of a string in a file.

Example

Firstly, check out the content of the “php.txt”:

Then, run the following commands:

According to the above code:

• First of all, we created a variable and then specified the “IO.File” class.
• The “ReadAllText()” method of the mentioned class reads the text in the file, while the “Replace()” method replaces the selected occurrences in the text file.
• In the second line, we have used the “[System.IO.File]::WriteAllText()” method and added the file path and then variable to replace the specified occurrence in the file:

Let’s check whether the word has been replaced or not. For

The word “php” has been replaced with “Python” successfully.

Conclusion

With PowerShell, every occurrence/instance of a string in a file can be replaced using two methods, including “Get-Content” and “Set-Content” and “System.IO.File”. Both methods first retrieve the text file and then replace the specified word’s occurrence in that text file. This post has presented a thorough guide to resolve the stated problem.