I need to remove BOM using cmd file from MyFile.txt. The file is located here.
“| Out-File -encoding utf8 ‘%CD%MyFile.txt'”
I need it to be removed using only one cmd, that is, in the next lines. I need it to be backwards compatible to Windows 7. If I needed it for myself only I would just use -encoding default, but its not backwards compatible even to win 10. Just one file. There were many different questions about BOM on different situations, my issue is I need to use one .cmd, I already have utf8 with BOM and I need it without BOM. Please help me.
I was trying to use powershell but the issue is powershell syntax is not really compatible to cmd? It just says about unrecognised syntax everytime I tried anything from the very popular theme like this Using PowerShell to write a file in UTF-8 without the BOM. So I need help really desperately.
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PowerShell is indeed your best bet, and while you cannot directly use PowerShell commands from cmd.exe / a batch file, you can pass them to powershell.exe, the Windows PowerShell CLI:
@echo off & setlocal
set "targetFile=%CD%MyFile.txt"
powershell -noprofile -c New-Item $env:targetFile -Force -Value (Get-Content -Raw -LiteralPath $env:targetFile)
Note:
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The PowerShell code takes advantage of the fact that
New-Item, when given a-Valueargument, creates a BOM-less UTF-8 file, even in Windows PowerShell (the legacy, ships-with-Windows, Windows-only edition of PowerShell whose latest and last version is 5.1) – see this answer for details. -
Caveat: By reading the entire file into memory first, with
Get-Content-Rawand rewriting it in full – with BOM-less UTF-8 encoding – there is a hypothetical risk of data loss, however unlikely: if rewriting the file’s content gets interrupted, say due to a power outage, data loss may occur.-
To eliminate this risk, you’d have to write to a temporary file first, and then, once the temporary file was successfully written, replace the original file with it.
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Similarly, you’d need a temporary file if the input file is too large to fit into memory as a whole (which is not typical for text files); in that case, you can combine
[IO.File]::ReadLines()with[IO.File]::WriteAllLines()to read and write line by line.
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