Powershell 2.0 generates nulls between characters

Question

With powershell 2.0:

write-output \"abcd\" >> mytext.txt  

returns:

a nul b nul c nul d nul

Answer 1

Powershell works in 16 bit unicode by default, and however you're reading the file is likely in an 8 bit format. You could interpret the sql in an application that can read UTF16, or, because >> is syntactic sugar for the out-file cmdlet, you can do the following instead:

write-output "abcd" | out-file -path mytext.txt -Encoding "UTF8" -Append