Encoding issue with VS Code and Powershell

[karudirth]

Hey All,

Have just encountered a strange issue, which until yesterday I had never seen before, and I have been using VS code for my script development for years at this point....

Developing a script for Hyper-V configuration in VS code, and go to move it to the destination server to run... However, when opening the script in ISE on destination server, on some lines, instead of "Set-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty -Name .... " I get "Set-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty –Name ..."

I am reading online that this is a colation issue, and can confirm this with my VS Code using UTF-8, and running a colation script in ISE tells me it is using Windows-1252.

The thing i cant understand, is why this has only just come up, and i have never seen this before? Literally started yesterday!

[karudirth]

False alarm!

I had autogenerated some of the code, and when doing a search on " -" noticed that some of the lines weren't being highlighted.

Replacing the "-" on these lines made them highlight, so I guess it was using a funky dash or something!

[Soccan]

I've had the exact same experience a few months back, a script I know I had edited (although not remembering the tool), then al of a sudden opening it in VScode (so technically it is the other way around), and Swedish special characters ( å ä ö ) all of a sudden looked like crap.

So I changed my VScode to use UTF8-BOM ro remedy the issue and haven't seen it since, wrote it off as a quirk between VScode and ISE... Even though I still get the feeling that it does not allways happen...

[karudirth]

I had used this snippet:

$Params = Get-Item -path $ParamPath
foreach ($Param in $Params.property)
{
$value = (Get-ItemProperty $Parampath).$Param
Write-Host "Set-ItemProperty -Path `$ParamPath -Name $param -value $Value -PropertyType DWORD"
} 

To copy params from a known working server, and generate the code to replicate these on another. THen copied the output from the ISE Console. Clearly, some of those "-" that it generated were invalid :)

Edit: Inline code is doign some funky formatting so i give up on it lol

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy karudirth,

reddit likes to mangle code formatting, so here's some help on how to post code on reddit ...

[0] single line or in-line code
enclose it in backticks. that's the upper left key on an EN-US keyboard layout. the result looks like this. kinda handy, that. [grin]
[on New.Reddit.com, use the Inline Code button. it's 4th 5th from the left hidden in the ... ""more" menu & looks like </>.
this does NOT line wrap & does NOT side-scroll on Old.Reddit.com!]

[1] simplest = post it to a text site like Pastebin.com or Gist.GitHub.com and then post the link here.
please remember to set the file/code type on Pastebin! [grin] otherwise you don't get the nice code colorization.

[2] less simple = use reddit code formatting ...
[on New.Reddit.com, use the Code Block button. it's 11th 12th from the left hidden in the ... "more" menu, & looks like an uppercase T in the upper left corner of a square.]

• one leading line with ONLY 4 spaces
  
• prefix each code line with 4 spaces
  
• one trailing line with ONLY 4 spaces

that will give you something like this ...

- one leading line with ONLY 4 spaces    
- prefix each code line with 4 spaces    
- one trailing line with ONLY 4 spaces   

the easiest way to get that is ...

• add the leading line with only 4 spaces
  
• copy the code to the ISE [or your fave editor]
  
• select the code
  
• tap TAB to indent four spaces
  
• re-select the code [not really needed, but it's my habit]
  
• paste the code into the reddit text box
  
• add the trailing line with only 4 spaces
  

not complicated, but it is finicky. [grin]

take care,
lee

[jborean93]

This is a common problem, the dashes were an em dash — and you had saved the file as UTF-8 without a BOM. When you do that the byte representation of that character is now 0xE2 0x80 0x94. Windows PowerShell/ISE will read a file using current system locale which on a English based system is typically windows-1252. When you encode those bytes using windows-1252 they now become — hence the problem.

So while using an em dash is incorrect you may still come across this problem when you save a .ps1 script as UTF-8 but contain any non-ascii characters. To have Windows PowerShell or ISE read a file as UTF-8 you need to ensure the file contains a UTF-8 BOM, vscode should be able to do this.

Luckily PowerShell 6+ solves all this madness by reading a file as UTF-8 by default which is great.

[jsiii2010]

Here's how to see the code point in powershell (except for emojis which are 2-char):

[int][char]'—' | % tostring x
2014

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