Powershell Out-File: Force encoding to Ascii

Question

I am attempting to normalize a set of TAB-delimited logfiles using Powershell.

Here is the current script:

(Get-ChildItem *.csv) |%{ #Store the name of the file & date $Name = $_.basename $FileDate = $_.CreationTime #Prepends the following to each message: unique Identifer, Hostname, date (Get-Content $_.fullname) -replace "^","AR-LOG|$Name|$FileDate|"| #Replaces the TAB delimeter with a Pipe delimeter Foreach-Object {$_ -replace ' ','|'} | #Appends the resulting message in ascii Out-File -append -FilePath normalized.log -Encoding ascii

A snippet of the input & output can be seen here:

http://pastebin.com/uaQadYUC

How can I force the output file to be ascii and not some type of unicode?

***Edit: Further troubleshooting reveals that the input files are actually windows-1252 encoded, which apparently Get-Content cannot handle natively(?)

thor · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-01 19:26:04Z

6

You should be able to use the encoding flag on out-file as in ... | Out-File -encoding ascii myfile.txt. And if you're using append, make sure all appends use the same encoding or you'll end up with an unusable file.

edited Apr 1, 2016 at 19:26

thor

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answered Apr 1, 2016 at 19:22

Bruce Payette

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2 Comments

Josh Brower Over a year ago

Yes, that is what I am doing in the script (which you can see), but it does not appear to be working.

aaron Over a year ago

not work, if the string itself is utf8

assembler · Accepted Answer · 2019-12-09 14:26:41Z

Change the format of a file from ASCII to UTF8:

$filename = "c:\docs\demo.csv" (Get-Content $filename) | Set-Content $filename -Encoding UTF8

Valeriy Glushenkov · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-05 00:49:29Z

Can you play around with ReadAllText method? It stores the whole file in a single string. Get-Content stores values as an array of strings where array value is the line of the file.

(Get-ChildItem *.csv) |%{ #Store the name of the file & date $Name = $_.basename $FileDate = $_.CreationTime #Prepends the following to each message: unique Identifer, Hostname, date ([IO.File]::ReadAllText($_.fullname)) -replace "^","AR-LOG|$Name|$FileDate|" #Replaces the TAB delimeter with a Pipe delimeter -replace ' ','|' | #Appends the resulting message in ascii Out-File -append -FilePath normalized.log -Encoding ascii

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