How do I efficiently transform a series of strings in powershell?

Question

Suppose I have a large number of strings formatted something like:

<tag>blah blahXXXXXblah blah</tag>

I want to transform these strings into something like:

blah blahZZZZZblah blah

on a powershell command line. All instances of XXXXX get replaced by ZZZZZ in the transformation and the outer tags are stripped out. It isn't well-formed XML.

I can write a script that would evaluate this easily enough, I believe, but when dealing with this particular bit of software I find myself performing tasks like this more often than I'd like. I'm interested in learning how to do this straight from the powershell command line without the additional step of writing a .ps1 script to run.

It seems like something powershell would be good at, I just don't know how. :)

Answer 1

if you can write the script just create a cmdlet

MSDN docs on Cmdlet creation

Answer 2

Well the simplest way that I can think of (assumes your list is held in $foo):

$foo | %{$_.Replace("XXXXX", "ZZZZZ")}