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?

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 change it to ASCII, so pipe to Out-File instead:

Get-Content -Encoding ASCII $projFile.FullName |     % { $_ -replace '<FooterText>(.+)</FooterText>', $newFooter } |     Out-File $tmpfile -Encoding ASCII