Unexpected behavior with a string stored in a variable in PowerShell

Question

I\'m getting some odd behavior from Excel\'s Cells.Find() method:

Variable I\'m searching on:

PS > $volumename
vol_01       

PS >         


        

Answer 1

The following snippet can be used to inspect a string for hidden control characters:

PS> & { [int[]] [char[]] $Args[0] | % { '0x{0:x} [{1}]' -f $_, [char] $_ } } "vol_01`n"
0x76 [v]
0x6f [o]
0x6c [l]
0x5f [_]
0x30 [0]
0x31 [1]
0xa [
]

The first column is each character's Unicode code point ("ASCII code"), and the second column the character itself, enclosed in [...]

Note that I've added "`n" at the end of the string - a newline character (U+000A) - whose code point expressed as a hex. number is 0xa.

If, as in your case, the only unwanted part of the string is trailing whitespace, you can remove them as follows:

$volumename.TrimEnd() # trim trailing whitespace

In your case, the trailing whitespace is 0xa0, the NO-BREAK SPACE (U+00A0), which .TrimEnd() also removes, as Tom Blodget points out.

---

Simple function wrapper based on the above, for use with pipeline input:

filter debug-Chars { [int[]] [char[]] $_ | % { '0x{0:x} [{1}]' -f $_, [char] $_ } }

Sample use:

"vol_01`n" | debug-Chars