I was evaluating what I thought was a string read from a file, then doing an .indexOf on that string. Took me over an hour to debug something so simple.

Trying to get the position of a string within a larger string is pretty basic stuff; yet I was getting the mystery result of -1.
I then printed the file to console, copied into a separate program as a string, and it worked fine.

I was also puzzling why the .LastIndexOf variable didn’t appear in the auto-complete of ISE. That should have been my clue.

When I did the following:

<pre>
$templateContent = Get-Content $inputTemplate 
</pre>

this creates an array in $templateContent, and arrays have a similar method called .IndexOf.

The solution was to add the “-raw tag”. I had tried “-encoding ASCII” and various encodings, and that not getting me anywhere.

<pre>
$templateContent = Get-Content $inputTemplate -raw
</pre>

Then the code to do the .IndexOf was straight forward. At first, I thought my issue was within the quotes in quotes, so I simplified to something like basic like the word “xml”.

<pre>
               $valueCustId = "Value=`"%CUSTID%`""; 
               $valueCustId = "xml"; 
               $posValueCustId = $updatedTemplateContent.IndexOf($valueCustId) 
               Write-Host "posValueCustId = $posValueCustId" 
</pre>

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49333243/powershell-indexof-is-not-working