Read PowerShell output from pipe with UTF-16 encoding

Question

I'm currently trying to read the output of PowerShell from a pipe, by calling CreateProcess().

startInfo.cb = sizeof(STARTUPINFOW);
startInfo.hStdError = pipes->hErrWrite;
startInfo.hStdOutput = pipes->hOutWrite;
startInfo.hStdInput = pipes->hInRead;
startInfo.dwFlags = STARTF_USESTDHANDLES

BOOL success = CreateProcessW(
    L"C:\\Windows\\System32\\WindowsPowerShell\\v1.0\\powershell.exe",
    NULL,
    NULL,
    NULL,
    TRUE,
    0,
    NULL,
    NULL,
    &startInfo,
    &procInfo
);

Everything works fine, but the output of PowerShell has a different encoding.
I already did the same procedure with CMD. Luckily, CMD has the option to start it with the /U parameter, which encododed the output in UTF-16.

Is there something similiar for PowerShell? At the end of the day, I'd like to store the output of powershell in a wchar_t buffer.

Answer 1

PowerShell has no equivalent to cmd.exe's /U, unfortunately.

The only way to control the output encoding that I know of is to change [console]::OutputEncoding from within the PowerShell process, but I'm not positive that will work in all scenarios:

Here's the piece of PowerShell code you'd need to execute before producing any output (you'd have to pass that as part of the command to execute via the -Command parameter):

[console]::outputencoding=[text.encoding]::unicode

Here's an example from the cmd.exe command line:

powershell -command "[console]::outputencoding=[text.encoding]::unicode; 'Motörhead'" > out.txt

This would produce a UTF16-LE-encoded out.txt file containing the string Motörhead.