You can use the -replace operator to perform a case-insensitive replacement in PowerShell:
$original_string -replace "ZACH", "Andy"
This particular example will replace the string “Zach” with the string “Andy“ in the string variable named $original_string, regardless of case.
This means that variations such as ZACH, Zach and zach would all be replaced with Andy in this scenario.
By contrast, the Replace() method is case-sensitive and will only perform a replacement if an exact matching case is found.
The following example shows how to use the -replace operator in practice.
Example: How to Use Case-Insensitive Replacement in PowerShell
Suppose we create a string variable named $original_string in PowerShell that contains the following string:
- “My name is Zach”
Suppose we attempt to use the Replace() method to replace “ZACH” with “Andy” instead:
$original_string = "My name is Zach"
$original_string.Replace("ZACH", "Andy")
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that no replacement is made because the text “ZACH” does not match the case of “Zach” in the string variable.
To perform a case-insensitive replacement, we must use the -replace operator instead:
$original_string = "My name is Zach"
$original_string -replace "ZACH", "Andy"
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that “Zach” has been replaced with “Andy” because we used a case-insensitive replacement this time.
Note that you could also use the -ireplace operator to make the replacement explicitly case-insensitive:
$original_string = "My name is Zach"
$original_string -ireplace "ZACH", "Andy"
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Once again, “Zach” has been replaced with “Andy” because we used the -ireplace operator to perform a case-insensitive replacement.
Note: You can find the complete documentation for the -replace and -ireplace operators in PowerShell here.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in PowerShell:
PowerShell: How to Replace Every Occurrence of String in File
PowerShell: How to Replace Special Characters in String
PowerShell: How to Concatenate Strings
