script to save file as unicode - unicode

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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
}

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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).

Answer 5

You can use iconv. On Windows you can use it under Cygwin.
iconv -f from_encoding -t to_encoding file

Answer 6

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..