I meant exactly that "it doesn't go as far as sed... or awk...". PowerShell has what I would term the primitives of string manipulation, inherited from .NET -- substring, trim, regex replace, etc. But it does not have the advanced methodologies that sed and awk provide. Especially in regards to editing, since PowerShell also inherits .NET's immutable strings.
This. AWK is the best tool for record DSV record manipulation I've ever used. Some would say that it has since been surpassed by other scripting languages, but I disagree. It's fast to learn, and is incredibly good at what it does, with a very simple and elegant design. Simple AWK scripts can read like descriptions of what you want done. Like this script that prints all users in /etc/passwd that have home directories in /home:
