I’m trying to write an IP address (It’s just a random test IP I used) to a file using powershell’s Write-Output and it’s writing the IP address to the file but adding null values after every character. Is there any way to do this properly, without the null characters?

>Solution :

I’m not sure why, but Write-Output '10.0.0.24' >> aws_hosts seem to produce an UTF-16 file (with at least 2 bytes per character) and then your VS Code tries to interpret it as UTF-8 showing all those \0 paddings as characters of its own.

Try '10.0.0.24' | Out-File -Encoding UTF8 -Append aws_hosts instead. That allows to control the output encoding.