Possible encoding issue with conda in PowerShell 7 - powershell

Question

I'm trying to set up conda for PowerShell but keep running into a strange error. I'm using miniconda3 (installed for all users) and PS version 7.3.1.
The conda executable is added to $Env:PATH and I'm able to run conda init powershell, which creates a profile.ps1 file in my PowerShell directory with the following contents:
#region conda initialize
Contents within this block are managed by 'conda init' !!
If (Test-Path "C:\ProgramData\miniconda3\Scripts\conda.exe") {
(& "C:\ProgramData\miniconda3\Scripts\conda.exe" "shell.powershell" "hook") | Out-String | ?{$_} | Invoke-Expression
}
#endregion
However, when restarting the terminal, I get this error:
$Env:CONDA_EXE: The term '$Env:CONDA_EXE' is not recognized as a name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or executable program.
Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
InvalidOperation: The expression after '&' in a pipeline element produced an object that was not valid. It must result in a command name,
a script block, or a CommandInfo object.
Invoke-Expression: Cannot bind argument to parameter 'Command' because it is null.
Notice the strange character in the beginning. I've seen a few discussions that have led me to believe that this might have something to do with the encoding of the profile.ps1 file or perhaps even the encoding of the output of conda.exe (if that makes any sense). I've tried changing the encoding of the profile file to UTF-8 (without BOM) and ANSI, as suggested in other threads (here and here), but this has not solved the problem.
Another thing that might be relevant to this is that when I run conda init powershell, the profile.ps1 file is actually created in a directory that's not the same as my "actual" user directory. This is because my Windows user name contains an accented character, so instead of C:\Users\AndrásAponyi\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\profile.ps1, the file gets written to C:\Users\Andr�sAponyi\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\profile.ps1 and I have to manually copy it to the correct location.
The same conda installation works perfectly fine with PowerShell version 5.1.

Answer 1

It seems that the issue is with the output of conda.exe that contains an unexpected character. This is causing the PowerShell profile to fail. There are a few things that you can try to resolve this issue:
Remove the existing profile.ps1 file
Create a new user profile without accented characters in the name or
rename the existing user profile to remove the accented characters
Re-run conda init powershell
Start a new PowerShell session and check if the issue has been
resolved
If the problem persists, you can try uninstalling and reinstalling Miniconda.