How can I prevent additional newlines with set-content while keeping existing ones when saving in UTF8?

Question

I have a small powershell script which reads a document with UTF8 encoding, makes some replacements in it and saves it back which looks like this:

(Get-Conte         


        

Answer 1

[IO.File]::WriteAllText() assumes that $content is a single string, but Get-Content produces an array of strings (and removes the line breaks from the end of each line/string). Mangling that string array into a single string joins the strings using the $OFS character (see here).

To avoid this behavior you need to ensure that $content already is a single string when it's passed to WriteAllText(). There are various ways to do that, for instance:

• Use Get-Content -Raw (PowerShell v3 or newer):

  $content = (Get-Content $path -Raw) -replace 'myregex', 'replacement'
  

• Pipe the output through Out-String:

  $content = (Get-Content $path | Out-String) -replace 'myregex', 'replacement' -replace '\r\n$'
  

  Note, however, that Out-String (just like Set-Content) adds a trailing line break, as was pointed out in the comments. You need to remove that with a second replacement operation.

• Join the array with the -join operator:

  $content = (Get-Content $path) -replace 'myregex', 'replacement' -join "`r`n"