Prevent trailing newline in PowerShell Out-File command
In PowerShell 5.0+, you would use:
"TestTest" | Out-File -encoding ascii test.txt -NoNewline
But in earlier versions you simply can't with that cmdlet.
Try this:
[System.IO.File]::WriteAllText($FilePath,"TestTest",[System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII)
To complement briantist's helpful answer re -NoNewline
:
The following applies not just to Out-File
, but analogously to Set-Content
/ Add-Content
as well; as stated, -NoNewline
requires PSv5+.
Note that -NoNewline
means that with multiple objects to output, it is not just a trailing newline (line break) that is suppressed, but any newlines.
In other words: The string representations of the input objects are directly concatenated, without a separator (terminator).
Therefore, the following commands result in the same file contents (TestTest
without a trailing newline):
# Single input string
"TestTest" | Out-File -encoding ascii test.txt -NoNewline
# Equivalent command: 2-element array of strings that are directly concatenated.
"Test", "Test" | Out-File -encoding ascii test.txt -NoNewline
In order to place newlines only between, but not also after the output objects, you must join the objects with newlines explicitly:
"Test", "Test" -join [Environment]::NewLine |
Out-File -encoding ascii test.txt -NoNewline
[Environment]::NewLine
is the platform-appropriate newline sequence (CRLF on Windows, LF on Unix-like platforms); you can also produce either sequence explicitly, if needed, with "`r`n"
and "`n"
Caveat:
The above -join
solution implicitly converts the input objects to strings, if they aren't already and does so by calling the .NET .ToString()
method on each object. This often yields a different representation than the one that Out-File
would directly create, because Out-File
uses PowerShell's default output formatter; for instance, compare the outputs of (Get-Date).ToString()
and just Get-Date
.
If your input comprises only strings and/or non-strings whose .ToString()
representation is satisfactory, the above solution works, but note that it is then generally preferable to use the Set-Content
cmdlet, which applies the same stringification implicitly.
For a complete discussion of the differences between Out-File
and Set-Content
, see this answer of mine.
If your input has non-strings that do you want to be formatted as they would print to the console, there is actually no simple solution: while you can use Out-String
to create per-object string representations with the default formatter, Out-String
's lack of -NoNewline
(as of v5.1; this GitHub issue suggests introducing it) would invariably yield trailing newlines.