Powershell – how to read Ansi CSV file

byMR

October 18, 2022

Notepad++ says the CSV file is Ansi encoded.

The Powershell 7 Import-CSV commandlet has various -Encoding options but ‘Ansi’ is not one of them.

How do I get Powershell to read this CSV without mangling it?

The options for -Encoding are:

ascii
bigendianunicode
bigendianutf32
oem
unicode
utf7
utf8
utf8BOM
utf8NoBOM
utf32

>Solution :

To use ANSI encoding, i.e. the code page implied by the active legacy system locale (language for non-Unicode programs):

in Windows PowerShell:
```
-Encoding Default
```
in PowerShell (Core) 7+, which you’re using, Default now refers to UTF-8, so more work is needed:
```
-Encoding ([cultureinfo]::CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ANSICodePage)
```

The absence of an Ansi -Encoding value in PowerShell (Core) 7+ is a curious omission, given that an Oem value (for the active OEM code page) does exist – see GitHub issue #6562 for a discussion.