Powershell: using redirection within the script produces a unicode output. How to emit single-byte ASCII text?

Question

I am using Sandcastle Helpfile Builder to produce a helpfile (.chm). The project is a .shfbproj file, which is XML format, works with msbuild.

I want to automatically update the Footer text that appears in the generated .chm file. I use this snippet:

$newFooter = "<FooterText>MyProduct v1.2.3.4</FooterText>";

get-content  -Encoding ASCII $projFile.FullName | 
    %{$_ -replace '<FooterText>(.+)</FooterText>', $newFooter } > $TmpFile

move-item $TmpFile $projFile.FullName -force

The output directed to the $TmpFile is always a multi-byte string. But I don't want that. How do I set the encoding of the output to ASCII?

Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

Answer 1

You could change the $OutputEncoding variable before writing to the file. The other option is not to use the > operator, but instead pipe directly to Out-File and use the -Encoding parameter.

Answer 2

The ">" redirection operator is a "shortcut" to out-file. Out file's default encoding is Unicode but you can chnage it to ASCII, so pipe to out-file instead:

get-content -Encoding ASCII $projFile.FullName | %{$_ -replace '(.+)', $newFooter } | out-file $tmpfile -encoding ASCII

Answer 3

| sc filename does the trick (sc being an alias for Set-Content)

for >> filename use | ac filename does the trick (ac being an alias for Add-Content)