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(?)

Answer 1

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.