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I'm trying to curl a website and grep it for a specific line in PowerShell. How can I do that?

Here's the equivalent of what I'm trying to do, but in BASH

user@host:~$ curl -s www.isxkcdshittytoday.com | grep YES title="YES">YES</a> user@host:~$

But when I do what I'd expect to be the equivalent in PowerShell, I get the entire response--not just what matches my sls (grep) expression

PS C:\Users\user> curl -UseBasicParsing isxkcdshittytoday.com | sls -ca YES <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Is xkcd shitty today?</title> <link rel="alternate" title="Is xkcd shitty today?" href="rss.xml" type="application/rss+xml" /> <script> (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); ga('create', 'UA-26584170-2', 'isxkcdshittytoday.com'); ga('send', 'pageview'); </script> </head> <body style="text-align: center; padding-top: 200px;"> <a href="rss.xml" style="font-weight: bold; font-size: 120pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; text-decoration: none; color: black;" title="YES">YES</a> </body> </html> PS C:\Users\user>

Why is the above command on PowerShell not working like it should? How can I pipe something from curl into sls as an alternative to grep in PowerShell?

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  • BTW, I don't know if this is a meme or anything... but I don't think XKCD is shitty at all. It's one of the best webcomics around. Commented Sep 16, 2020 at 0:40
  • Yeah, xkcd is great. I just couldn't think of any other website whose contents is extremely short and never changes, so it was perfect for this example. Commented Sep 17, 2020 at 10:10
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    why did this question get downvoted? Commented Sep 28, 2020 at 15:16

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It looks like Select-String is quite confused about the concept of "lines".

The solution is to split the text into an array of actual lines and then use Select-String on them:

$r = Invoke-WebRequest www.isxkcdshittytoday.com $lines = $r.Content.Split([Environment]::NewLine) $lines | Select-String 'yes'

or, on a single line and with shortcut aliases:

(curl www.isxkcdshittytoday.com).Content.Split([Environment]::NewLine) | sls 'yes'

Please note that in PowerShell curl is an alias for Invoke-WebRequest, which returns a complex object of type HtmlWebResponseObject; in order to get the actual text of the response you have to look at the Content attribute, which instead is a String (and as such can be split); your example only works because of implicit string conversion.

Please also note that splitting a text into lines is not as easy as it seems.

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