Export-csv changing names with apostrophes

PowerShell Help
1

Good afternoon,

We have 2 servers that we use for production and development.

When I run the exact same script in the “dev” box the export-csv leaves the users name with apostrophes alone.
The “Production” box changes the names with an apostrophe with an “?”

We are using the following:

$MyTable.rows | Export-Csv -Path $FileName -NoTypeInformation

Examples:

In Dev the user is Bryan O’Holmstrom and the export csv file has it as the same
In Production the user is Bryan O’Holmstrom and the export csv file has it as 'Bryan O?Holmstrom

Thanks in advance,

2

Most likely, you’re dealing with a Unicode character that just looks like an apostrophe, and your CSV file has encoded as ASCII. Depending on what you need to do with the resulting CSV file, you can either add “-Encoding UTF8” (or Unicode, or whatever) to your Export-Csv command, or you can make sure the text is all ASCII before exporting it. If you’re trying to open the file in Excel, you may need to stick to ASCII; I don’t believe it will parse Unicode CSV files properly.

3

Dont you think it’s strange that one server does it right and the other doesn’t?

I sent this to my engineers:

In production I get ‘Stephanie O?Rourk’

I checked and both versions of Powershell are identical.

The only difference I see right now is that newk-shared (Dev) has Office 2010 and hostshare103v (Production) does not have Office installed. And the Dev box has .NETFramework 4.0 and Production has .NETFramework 3.5

4

Strange, yes, but there’s not much I can do to troubleshoot that from here. First thing I would do is check to see if that string contains any multi-byte characters, and then check the encoding of the CSV file. Here’s a quick example of one way to test for that, and several examples of Unicode characters that look similar to the ASCII apostrophe:

function ContainsMultiByteCharacters ([string] $String)
{
    if ($null -eq $String) { return $false }
    return [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetByteCount($String) -ne $String.Length
}

[char[]]$chars = [char]0x02BC, [char]0x275C, [char]0x2019, "'"
$string1 = New-Object string (,$chars)
$string2 = "Just a plain old string."


New-Object psobject -Property @{
    String = $string1
    ContainsMultiByteCharacters = ContainsMultiByteCharacters $string1
}

New-Object psobject -Property @{
    String = $string2
    ContainsMultiByteCharacters = ContainsMultiByteCharacters $string2
}
5

Thank you,

I found the special characters, they were coming from our AD extract everynight on the users name.