Question

When i am placing my $string variable contents into some text file, it adds some junk character it seems. For example i am writing an utility name in string and copy that string to file like follows.

$CodeCount+="ccount.exe"

$CodeCount | Out-file "C:\CodeCount.bat"

When i am executing this batch file , it fails by showing some junk character in front.

Even i tried with trim() but still the same result.

How to avoid adding Junk character in front?

Answer 1

Don’t use out-file, atleast, in the default form. Use set-content. Or explicitly set the encoding in out-file something like out-file -encoding ascii. Out-file by default uses utf16 ( ucs-2 actually) encoding which doesn’t get treated as plain text in many applications ( including version control systems like Hg, Git ) and add the “funny” characters that you mention.

Note that the redirection > is same as out-file and will give you the same results.