script to save file as unicode

Do you know any way that I could programmatically or via scrirpt transform a set of text files saved in ansi character encoding, to unicode encoding?

I would like to do the same as I do when I open the file with notepad and choose to save it as an unicode file.

From stackoverflow

• Use the System.IO.StreamReader(To read the file contents) class together with the System.Text.Encoding.Encoding(To create the Encoder object which does the encoding) base class.

• pseudo code...

  Dim system, file, contents, newFile, oldFile

  Const ForReading = 1, ForWriting = 2, ForAppending = 3 Const AnsiFile = -2, UnicodeFile = -1

  Set system = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject...

  Set file = system.GetFile("text1.txt")

  Set oldFile = file.OpenAsTextStream(ForReading, AnsiFile)

  contents = oldFile.ReadAll()

  oldFile.Close

  system.CreateTextFile "text1.txt"

  Set file = system.GetFile("text1.txt")

  Set newFile = file.OpenAsTextStream(ForWriting, UnicodeFile)

  newFile.Write contents

  newFile.Close

  Hope this approach will work..

• You can use iconv. On Windows you can use it under Cygwin.

  iconv -f from_encoding -t to_encoding file
  

  guillermooo : Why's the accepted answer related to Cygwin? The question is tagged as powershell...

  river0 : Yes, at the begining I was looking for a powershell solution, but turns out that this worked really good for me and I could also use cygwin. Anyway all the reponses given seem to be valid approaches

• The easiest way would be Get-Content 'path/to/text/file' | out-file 'name/of/file'.

  Out-File has an -encoding parameter, the default of which is Unicode.

  If you wanted to script a batch of them, you could do something like

  $files = get-childitem 'directory/of/text/files' 
  foreach ($file in $files) 
  {
    get-content $file | out-file $file.fullname
  }
  

• You could create a new text file and write the bytes from the original file into the new one, placing a '\0' before each original byte (assuming the original text file was in English).

• This could work for you, but notice that it'll grab every file in the current folder:

  
  Get-ChildItem | Foreach-Object { $c = (Get-Content $_); `
  Set-Content -Encoding UTF8 $c -Path ($_.name + "u") }
  

  Same thing using aliases for brevity:

  
  gci | %{ $c = (gc $_); sc -Encoding UTF8 $c -Path ($_.name + "u") }
  

  Steven Murawski suggests using Out-File instead. The differences between both cmdlets are the following:

  • Out-File will attempt to format the input it receives.
  • Out-File's default encoding is Unicode-based, whereas Set-Content uses the system's default.

  Here's an example assuming the file test.txt doesn't exist in either case:

  
  PS> [system.string] | Out-File test.txt
  PS> Get-Content test.txt
  
  IsPublic IsSerial Name                                     BaseType          
  -------- -------- ----                                     --------          
  True     True     String                                   System.Object     
  
  # test.txt encoding is Unicode-based with BOM
  
  

  
  PS> [system.string] | Set-Content test.txt
  PS> Get-Content test.txt
  
  System.String
  
  # test.txt encoding is "ANSI" (Windows character set)
  

  In fact, if you don't need any specific Unicode encoding, you could as well do the following to convert a text file to Unicode:

  
  PS> Get-Content sourceASCII.txt > targetUnicode.txt
  

  Out-File is a "redirection operator with optional parameters" of sorts.