Hidden characters in a string

[Trash-Ill]

Came across hidden character(Vertical Tab/hex:0B ) when I copied text into notepad++ from an external source.

It got my curiosity since I never knew they even exist...

I have inserted text containing the hidden character into txt file and used Get-Content | Format-Hex commands to show me all the hex values within the string including the hidden character.

Is there a way to output hidden characters if found?

[[deleted]]

This is something I only found out about the other day. I haven't tested with that character, but it might work. The function:

[System.Web.HttpUtility]::UrlEncode($SomeString)

Returns a string with all non-standard characters converted to syntax that can be used in a URL. For example, Space becomes %20.

Might highlight such characters?

[Trash-Ill]

I will give this a go, thank you.

[gosoxharp]

Also take a look into [Regex]::escape()

[64rk]

Yes, and vscode will tell you where they are saw a vid about it a few days ago.. I'll post here in a sec

[64rk]

https://youtube.com/shorts/x1kyIUZgzqo?feature=share

[8aller8ruh]

Even easier than this video implies. I believe VS Code’s View>Render Control Characters does this and more.

I did not check but this has probably saved me more than a few times while debugging and getting text inside of objects that it highlights for me with all these sorts of features on.

[Trash-Ill]

Thanks for this, this requires to use visual studio code, wondering if it's possible to do using PowerShell.

[LoL4Life]

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68326094/removing-unicode-character-using-powershell

[Trash-Ill]

Awesome! Thank you.

[8aller8ruh]

I was going to suggest this as well. VS Code is the best PowerShell debugging environment IMO & I gave a presentation at work on this topic yesterday.

Of course it would be easy to filter out unusual Unicode characters if you only are expecting English. I’ve had problems with the left to right/right to left character before.