Windows Powershell Output to File. Strange Characters

Question

Running this command:

echo "foo" > test.txt

I get strange results in test.txt. I actually can't even copy-paste the contents directly here in stack overflow but need to show the hex output of the file. Which looks like this-

ff fe 66 00 6f 00 6f 00 0d 00 0a 00

Not sure what FF and FE are but it looks like it's also placing NULL between each character.

Can any Windows people guide me in the right direction as to why this is happening and how I can resolve it? I just want to the contents "foo" to be placed in that file unmolested.

micah · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-21 18:58:43Z

8

0xFFFE is the Unicode byte order mark for UTF-16 LE (little endian), which is normal Windows Unicode.

The contents of your file are the two byte BOM, 0x6600 ("f"), 0x6f00 ("o"), 0x6f00 ("o"), 0x0d00 ("`r" or carriage return), 0x0a00 ("`n" or new line)

Try:

echo "foo" | Out-File -FilePath test.txt -Encoding utf8

edited Mar 21, 2016 at 18:58

micah

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answered Mar 21, 2016 at 17:51

Bacon Bits

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3 Comments

micah Over a year ago

Ah I see. So those aren't nulls, they are just the extra length given it's 16bit encoded. Thanks!

Bacon Bits Over a year ago

Yep. You can kind of confirm what's going on like this: [System.Text.Encoding]::Unicode.GetString([byte[]](0xff,0xfe,0x66,0x00,0x6f,0x00,0x6f,0x00,0x0d,0x00,0x0a,0x00)).

Frode F. Over a year ago

Could also use Set-Content which uses ASCII/ANSI/whatever as default.

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