Set windows default encoding to utf 8

The short answer is no, it is not possible.

To elaborate, I am afraid you won’t find a global encoding option in Windows 7 that lets you both 1) set a global default which 2) all the applications you listed would obey.

Also, I would like to ask what is the problem here that you are trying to solve?

It is up to the application to choose whether they use unicode internally to represent data. While use of unicode is encouraged, you may never be sure that all your applications in fact do internally support it.

What you can do, however is change the default character encoding for each of the listed applications:

• For Eclipse, default encoding for new files can be set from Windows > Preferences > General > Content Types (see post on Eclipse Community Forms)
• For Notepad++, navigate to Settings > Preferences > New Document/Default/Directory and set Encoding to UTF-8
• As for Thunderbird, I am pretty sure it already uses UTF-8 as the default encoding? (see these notes about character encoding)
• In the case of OpenOffice (and LibreOffice), you actually don’t even need to care about encoding, since documents saved by OpenOffice are based on XML, in which encoding is specified internally in the XML-files (and UTF-8 is already the default there as well)
• From UTF-8 point-of-view, PowerShell is tricky. It has default encoding of UTF-16LE.
  • For outputting files from PowerShell to UTF-8, see this answer
  • For changing default encoding see this answer

Let me try to summarize, now that we (hopefully) have the full picture:

^{I’ve hidden my previous comments in favor of this one, @nu8 — I encourage you to do the same, as appropriate. This comment also corrects my incorrect earlier claim that you cannot set the ANSI code page to 65001.}

This issue is about making UTF-8 support in PowerShell on Windows complete, by making sure that PowerShell also uses UTF-8 when communicating with external programs (the built-in cmdlets already default to UTF-8, invariably so), which requires setting [console]::InputEncoding and [console]::OutputEncoding to (BOM-less) UTF-8 (possibly indirectly).

Currently, in the absence of PowerShell doing that itself, there are two workarounds:

Option 1: Put the following statement in your $PROFILE:

# In *Windows PowerShell*, prepend `$OutputEncoding = `
[console]::InputEncoding = [console]::OutputEncoding = [System.Text.UTF8Encoding]::new()

Pros and cons:

• Doesn’t require administrative privileges and takes effect in new windows without the need for a reboot.
• Requires modifying $PROFILE
• Is bypassed if the CLI is used as pwsh -noprofile ...

Note: In Windows PowerShell, you must prepend $OutputEncoding = to the above command, in order to also make Windows PowerShell send UTF-8 to external programs. (In PowerShell [Core], this preference variably commendably defaults to (BOM-less) UTF-8.)

Option 2: Change the active code pages to 65001 system-wide (W10+):

• GUI method: via intl.cpl (Control Panel), tab Administrative, Change system locale...); as previously noted, this is still labeled as Beta: as of Windows 10 release 1909, though I suspect it will work fine as long as you use only modern command-line utilities.

• Equivalent programmatic method, based on @nu8’s approach:

# Requires ELEVATION and a REBOOT
'ACP', 'OEMCP', 'MACCP' | Set-ItemProperty HKLM:SYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlNlsCodePage -Name { $_ } 65001
# Restart-Computer

Pros and cons:

• Due to a .NET bug still present in the .NET version underlying PowerShell Core 7.1.0-preview.3, [console]::InputEncoding and [console]::OutputEncoding are mistakenly set to UTF-8 encoding with BOM, which causes follow-on bugs; notably, it breaks Start-Job in PowerShell. See System.Console unexpectedly uses a UTF-8 encoding *with BOM* on Windows dotnet/runtime#28929. Option 1 above doesn’t have this problem.

  • Curiously, by contrast, the [System.Text.Encoding]::Default encoding that reflects the active ANSI code page contains a BOM-less UTF-8 encoding after the system-wide change (see below).

  • Note that the bug can also manifest without the system-wide change, namely if you manually run chcp 65001 from cmd.exe, for instance, before invoking PowerShell (running chcp from inside PowerShell isn’t supported and requires Option 1 instead).

• Requires administrative privileges and a reboot.

• Takes effect system-wide: it applies to all console / Windows Terminal windows, notably including those running cmd.exe

• Invariably also uses UTF-8 as the ANSI code page (not just the OEM code page), as reflected in [System.Text.Encoding]::Default (note that this also applies if you set only the OEMCP registry value to 65001; (Get-Culture).TextInfo.ANSICodePage, by contrast, continues to report the locale-appropriate code page, e.g. 1252).

  • If you’re (also) running Windows PowerShell, this means that the setting invariably makes Windows PowerShell‘s ANSI-encoding-default cmdlets default to UTF-8, notably Get-Content and Set-Content, which, depending on your backward-compatibility needs:
    • may be desirable for consistent UTF-8 use across both PowerShell editions.
      • Note: short of placing $PSDefaultParameterValues['*:Encoding'] = 'utf8' in your $PROFILE, this is the only way to get Windows PowerShell to consistently default to UTF-8.
        Curiously, the system-wide change causes Windows PowerShell to then create BOM-less UTF-8 files by default with Set-Content, something that cannot otherwise achieved, except with direct use of .NET.
    • may be undesired, if you have existing code that uses Get-Content and Set-Content without -Encoding and you need to process BOM-less files that are ANSI- rather than UTF-8-encoded.
  • Also, in Windows PowerShell only, you must additionally still run
    $OutputEncoding = [System.Text.Utf8Encoding]::new() (via $PROFILE) in order to also make Windows PowerShell send UTF-8 to external programs.

A note on file encoding:

If making Windows PowerShell too default to UTF-8 via the system-wide change is not an option, BOM-less UTF-8 files will only be read correctly under one of the following conditions:

• you use -Encoding Utf8 with file-handling cmdlets.

• you convert your BOM-less UTF-8 files to have a BOM

  • such files can be problematic in cross-platform use; on Unix-like platforms, a UTF-8 BOM can be misinterpreted as data
  • conversely, if you write PowerShell code that contains (runtime-relevant) non-ASCII characters and needs to run in both editions, saving your source code files as UTF-8 with BOM is a must (though you could also use UTF-16).

• you preset the default encoding via $PSDefaultParameterValues['*:Encoding'] = 'utf8', but you’ll have to scope this setting if you don’t want all code to use these defaults.

Note that Windows PowerShell — curiously, except if the system-wide change is made — only ever creates UTF-8 files with BOM (whereas PowerShell [Core] defaults to BOM-less UTF-8 and has an -Encoding utf8BOM opt-in); direct use of .NET is required to work around that — see this SO answer.

1. Unicode in PowerShell
2. Change System Locale to Use UTF-8 Encoding in Windows PowerShell
3. Set Encoding in $PSDefaultParameterValues Variable to Use UTF-8 Encoding in Windows PowerShell

This tutorial will teach you to use UTF-8 encoding in Windows PowerShell.

Unicode in PowerShell

Unicode is a worldwide character encoding standard. It defines how characters in text files, web pages, and other documents are represented.

The computer system uses Unicode to manipulate characters and strings. The default encoding in PowerShell is Windows-1252.

Unicode was developed to support characters from all languages of the world. PowerShell supports a Unicode character encoding by default.

UTF-8 and UTF-16 are the most common Unicode encodings. PowerShell always uses BOM in all Unicode encodings except UTF7.

The BOM (byte-order-mark) is a Unicode signature included at the first few bytes of a file or text stream that indicates the Unicode encoding.

Change System Locale to Use UTF-8 Encoding in Windows PowerShell

There is an option to change the system locale (current language for non-Unicode programs) in Windows. But this feature is still in beta.

Go to Region Settings from the Control Panel or open intl.cpl from the Run program.

Open the Administrative tab and click Change system locale. Then check the Beta option as shown in the image below.

After that, press OK and restart the computer to apply the settings.

After restarting the computer, you can check the $OutputEncoding variable to view the current encoding.

Output:

As you can see, the current encoding is Unicode (UTF-8).

BodyName          : utf-8
EncodingName      : Unicode (UTF-8)
HeaderName        : utf-8
WebName           : utf-8
WindowsCodePage   : 1200
IsBrowserDisplay  : True
IsBrowserSave     : True
IsMailNewsDisplay : True
IsMailNewsSave    : True
IsSingleByte      : False
EncoderFallback   : System.Text.EncoderReplacementFallback
DecoderFallback   : System.Text.DecoderReplacementFallback
IsReadOnly        : True
CodePage          : 65001

Now, you can view the characters of other languages in PowerShell.

Output:

Set Encoding in $PSDefaultParameterValues Variable to Use UTF-8 Encoding in Windows PowerShell

You can run the following command to activate the UTF-8 encoding in PowerShell.

$PSDefaultParameterValues = @{'*:Encoding' = 'utf8'}

It is only valid for the current PowerShell console. It will be reset to default after you exit the PowerShell window.

Output:

Several cmdlets in PowerShell have the -Encoding parameter to specify the encoding for different character sets. Some of them are Add-Content, Set-Content, Get-Content, Export-Csv, Out-File, etc.

The -Encoding parameter supports these values: ascii, bigendianunicode, oem, unicode, utf7, utf8 ,utf8BOM, utf8NoBOM, utf32.

We hope this tutorial gave you an idea of using UTF-8 Encoding (CHCP 65001) in Windows PowerShell.