How do I encode Unicode character codes in a PowerShell string literal?

user_60620 0
Viewed 57682

How can I encode the Unicode character U+0048 (H), say, in a PowerShell string?

In C# I would just do this: "\u0048", but that doesn't appear to work in PowerShell.

string-literals unicode-literals unicode powershell
7 Answers

Replace '\u' with '0x' and cast it to System.Char:

PS > [char]0x0048
H

You can also use the "$()" syntax to embed a Unicode character into a string:

PS > "Acme$([char]0x2122) Company"
AcmeT Company

Where T is PowerShell's representation of the character for non-registered trademarks.

Note: this method works only for characters in Plane 0, the BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane), chars < U+10000.

Shay_Levy_98330

Another way using PowerShell.

$Heart = $([char]0x2665)
$Diamond = $([char]0x2666)
$Club = $([char]0x2663)
$Spade = $([char]0x2660)
Write-Host $Heart -BackgroundColor Yellow -ForegroundColor Magenta

Use the command help Write-Host -Full to read all about it.

user_4479010

For those of us still on 5.1 and wanting to use the higher-order Unicode charset (for which none of these answers work) I made this function so you can simply build strings like so:

'this is my favourite park ',0x1F3DE,'. It is pretty sweet ',0x1F60A | Unicode

enter image description here

#takes in a stream of strings and integers,
#where integers are unicode codepoints,
#and concatenates these into valid UTF16
Function Unicode {
    Begin {
        $output=[System.Text.StringBuilder]::new()
    }
    Process {
        $output.Append($(
            if ($_ -is [int]) { [char]::ConvertFromUtf32($_) }
            else { [string]$_ }
        )) | Out-Null
    }
    End { $output.ToString() }
}

Note that getting these to display in your console is a whole other problem, but if you're outputting to an Outlook email or a Gridview (below) it will just work (as utf16 is native for .NET interfaces).

enter image description here

This also means you can also output plain control (not necessarily unicode) characters pretty easily if you're more comfortable with decimal since you dont actually need to use the 0x (hex) syntax to make the integers. 'hello',32,'there' | Unicode would put a non-breaking space betwixt the two words, the same as if you did 0x20 instead.

user_25183170

To make it work for characters outside the BMP you need to use Char.ConvertFromUtf32()

'this is my favourite park ' + [char]::ConvertFromUtf32(0x1F3DE) + 
'. It is pretty sweet ' + [char]::ConvertFromUtf32(0x1F60A)
user_9957140

Note that some characters like might need a "double rune" to be printed:

   PS> "C:\foo\bar\$([char]0xd83c)$([char]0xdf0e)something.txt"

Will print:

   C:\foo\bar\something.txt

You can find these "runes" here, in the "unicode escape" row:

   https://dencode.com/string
user_8636510
Related