How to convert pipeline to CSV format and specify UTF-8 encoding

powershell powershell-2.0 powershell-ise
user3189976 picture user3189976 · Jan 13, 2014 · Viewed 48.1k times · Source

In a Windows PowerShell script, I want to execute code which converts a pipeline to CSV format, and encoding should be in UTF-8. How can I do this?

Answer

Adi Inbar picture Adi Inbar · Jan 20, 2014

Add this to the end of your pipeline:

| Export-Csv -Encoding UTF8

It's that simple.

The -Encoding parameter is available for any cmdlet that outputs to a file--Out-File, Set-Content, Add-Content, Export-Clixml, probably some others I'm not thinking of. One gotcha to watch out for is that for UTF16, you need to specify Unicode instead of UTF16 (I think the latter makes more sense, and should at least be available as a synonym, but apparently Microsoft doesn't). The full list of options is:

Unicode,UTF7,UTF8,ASCII,UTF32,BigEndianUnicode,Default,OEM

A couple of notes:

  • ASCII technically doesn't give you ASCII encoding, it gives you Windows codepage 1252 (which is based on extended ASCII and often informally referred to as ASCII).
  • Default gives you whichever of the other options is the system default. You can find out what the default is with [System.Text.Encoding]::Default.

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