Default PowerShell to emitting UTF-8 instead of UTF-16?

Question

By default, PowerShell in Windows seems to be outputting UTF-16 (e.g., if I do a simple echo hello > hi.txt, then hi.txt ends up in UTF-16). I know that I can force this to my desired text encoding by instead doing echo hello | out-file -encoding utf8 hi.txt, but what I'd like is for that to just be the default when I use the redirection operator. Is there any way to achieve this?

Answer 1

Using a .NET decompiler on the System.Management.Automation assembly (a.k.a. the "Microsoft Windows PowerShell Engine Core Assembly") reveals this code fragment:

// class: System.Management.Automation.RedirectionNode
private PipelineProcessor BuildRedirectionPipeline(string path, ExecutionContext context)
{
    CommandProcessorBase commandProcessorBase = context.CreateCommand("out-file");
    commandProcessorBase.AddParameter("-encoding", "unicode");
    if (this.Appending)
    {
        commandProcessorBase.AddParameter("-append", true);
    }
    commandProcessorBase.AddParameter("-filepath", path);
    ...

So, it looks pretty hardcoded to me.

FYI, this was on Windows 7 Enterprise x64 system with PowerShell 2.0 installed.

Answer 2

You need to change the default encoding of redirection operators (> and >>). The Out-File cmdlet is used behind the scenes when you use these operators.

$PSDefaultParameterValues['Out-File:Encoding'] = 'utf8'

See Powershell Docs for details.

Answer 3

Not sure if this will do exactly what you're looking for, but you can try setting the environment variable as mentioned here

$OutputEncoding = New-Object -typename System.Text.UTF8Encoding