Issues with specific characters in outfile - powershell

Question

I have a script that merges files and that works fine - but characters like åäö looks not good in the output file
Here is the complete script:
$startOfToday = (Get-Date).Date
Get-ChildItem "C:\TEST -include *.* -Recurse |
Where-Object LastWriteTime -gt $startOfToday | ForEach-Object {gc $_; ""} |
Out-File "C:\$(Get-Date -Format 'yyyy/mm/dd').txt"
In the files in looks like this for example
Order ID 1
Order ID 2
This is för får
In the output it gets like this for the last row
Order ID 1
Order ID 2
får för fär
is there a way to make those characters appear in the output file as they appear in the first file?

Answer 1

The implication is that your input files are UTF-8-encoded without a BOM, which in Windows PowerShell are (mis)interpreted to be ANSI-encoded (using the system's active ANSI code page, such as Windows-1252).
The solution is to tell gc (Get-Content) explicitly what encoding to use, via the -Encoding parameter:
Get-ChildItem C:\TEST -include *.* -Recurse |
Where-Object LastWriteTime -gt $startOfToday |
ForEach-Object { Get-Content -Encoding Utf8 $_; ""} |
Out-File "C:\$(Get-Date -Format 'yyyy/mm/dd').txt"
Note that PowerShell never preserves the input encoding automatically, therefore, in the absence of using -Encoding with Out-File, its default encoding is used, which is "Unicode" (UTF-16LE) in Windows PowerShell.
While PowerShell (Core) 7+ also doesn't preserve input encodings, it consistently defaults to BOM-less UTF-8, so your original code would work as-is there.
For more information about default encodings in Windows PowerShell vs. PowerShell (Core) 7+, see this answer.
Note: As AdminOfThings suggests in a comment, simply replacing Out-File with Set-Content in your original code also works in this particular case, because the same misinterpretation of the encoding is then performed on both in- and output, and the data is simply being passed through. This isn't a general solution, however, notably not if you need to process the strings in memory first, before saving them to a file.