echo “string” > file in Windows PowerShell appends non-printable character to the file

Question

In Windows PowerShell:

echo \"string\" > file.txt

In Cygwin:

$ cat file.txt
:::s t r i         


        

Answer 1

These two commands are equivalent in that they both use UTF-16 encoding by default:

echo "string" > file.txt
echo "string" | out-file file.txt

You can add an explicit encoding parameter to the latter form (as indicated by jon Z) to produce plain ASCII:

echo "string" | out-file -encoding ASCII file.txt

Alternately, you could use set-content, which uses ASCII encoding by default:

echo "string" | set-content file.txt

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Corollary 1:

Want to convert a unicode file to ASCII in one line?

Just use this:

get-content your_unicode_file | set-content your_ascii_file

which can be abbreviated to:

gc your_unicode_file | sc your_ascii_file

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Corollary 2:

Want to get a hex dump so you can really see what is unicode and what is ASCII?

Use the clean and simple Get-HexDump function available on PowerShell.com. With that in place you can examine your generated files with just:

Get-HexDump file.txt

For anything non-trivial, you can specify how many columns wide you want the output and how many bytes of the file to process with something like this:

Get-HexDump file.txt -width 15 -bytes 150