{"id":9121,"date":"2006-12-11T18:26:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-11T18:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/powershell\/2006\/12\/11\/outputencoding-to-the-rescue\/"},"modified":"2019-02-18T13:21:04","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T20:21:04","slug":"outputencoding-to-the-rescue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/outputencoding-to-the-rescue\/","title":{"rendered":"$OutputEncoding to the rescue"},"content":{"rendered":"

You might have noticed that \u201cfindstr\u201d does not work properly with non-English text in PowerShell.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example:<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s create a text file with some Chinese characters in it.<\/span><\/p>\n

PS C:\\> ${c:\\test.txt}=”<\/span>\u4e2d\u6587<\/span>“<\/span><\/p>\n

Try to use findstr to find  one of the Chinese characters, and it did not find anything.<\/span><\/p>\n

PS C:\\> Get-Content test.txt | findstr \/c:<\/span>\u4e2d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The same command works in Cmd.exe.<\/span><\/p>\n

PS C:\\> cmd \/c “findstr \/c:<\/span>\u4e2d<\/span> test.txt”<\/span><\/p>\n

\u4e2d\u6587<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

What went wrong? When we pipe output data from PowerShell cmdlets into native applications, the output encoding from PowerShell cmdlets is controlled by the $OutputEncoding variable, which is by default set to ASCII. We can fix the afore-mentioned scenario by changing $OutputEncoding to [Console]::OutputEncoding.<\/span><\/p>\n

PS C:\\> $OutputEncoding<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

IsSingleByte      : True<\/span><\/p>\n

BodyName          : us-ascii<\/span><\/p>\n

EncodingName      : US-ASCII<\/span><\/p>\n

HeaderName        : us-ascii<\/span><\/p>\n

WebName           : us-ascii<\/span><\/p>\n

WindowsCodePage   : 1252<\/span><\/p>\n

IsBrowserDisplay  : False<\/span><\/p>\n

IsBrowserSave     : False<\/span><\/p>\n

IsMailNewsDisplay : True<\/span><\/p>\n

IsMailNewsSave    : True<\/span><\/p>\n

EncoderFallback   : System.Text.EncoderReplacementFallback<\/span><\/p>\n

DecoderFallback   : System.Text.DecoderReplacementFallback<\/span><\/p>\n

IsReadOnly        : True<\/span><\/p>\n

CodePage          : 20127<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

PS C:\\> $OutputEncoding = [Console]::OutputEncoding<\/span><\/p>\n

PS C:\\> $OutputEncoding<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

BodyName          : gb2312<\/span><\/p>\n

EncodingName      : <\/span>\u7b80<\/span>\u4f53\u4e2d\u6587<\/span>(GB2312)<\/span><\/p>\n

HeaderName        : gb2312<\/span><\/p>\n

WebName           : gb2312<\/span><\/p>\n

WindowsCodePage   : 936<\/span><\/p>\n

IsBrowserDisplay  : True<\/span><\/p>\n

IsBrowserSave     : True<\/span><\/p>\n

IsMailNewsDisplay : True<\/span><\/p>\n

IsMailNewsSave    : True<\/span><\/p>\n

IsSingleByte      : False<\/span><\/p>\n

EncoderFallback   : System.Text.InternalEncoderBestFitFallback<\/span><\/p>\n

DecoderFallback   : System.Text.InternalDecoderBestFitFallback<\/span><\/p>\n

IsReadOnly        : True<\/span><\/p>\n

CodePage          : 936<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

PS C:\\> Get-Content test.txt | findstr \/c:<\/span>\u4e2d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u4e2d\u6587<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

Voila! Now findstr works!<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span> <\/p>\n

Wei Wu [MSFT]<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span> <\/p>\n

<\/span> <\/p>\n

<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n

POSTSCRIPT:  The reason we convert to ASCII when piping to existing executables is that most commands today do not process UNICODE correctly.  Some do, most don’t.  <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Snover<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You might have noticed that \u201cfindstr\u201d does not work properly with non-English text in PowerShell. For example: Let\u2019s create a text file with some Chinese characters in it. PS C:\\> ${c:\\test.txt}=”\u4e2d\u6587“ Try to use findstr to find  one of the Chinese characters, and it did not find anything. PS C:\\> Get-Content test.txt | findstr \/c:\u4e2d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":600,"featured_media":13641,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-powershell"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

You might have noticed that \u201cfindstr\u201d does not work properly with non-English text in PowerShell. For example: Let\u2019s create a text file with some Chinese characters in it. PS C:\\> ${c:\\test.txt}=”\u4e2d\u6587“ Try to use findstr to find  one of the Chinese characters, and it did not find anything. PS C:\\> Get-Content test.txt | findstr \/c:\u4e2d […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/600"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}