Help files should be UTF-8 encoded

[juneb]

Can we test help files in the modules, both XML and TXT, to assure that the encoding is UTF-8? There should be an error if it has any other encoding.

[KirkMunro]

Good idea! I'd like to see this check ps1, psm1, psd1, and ps1xml file encodings as well, warning on any files that are not UTF-8 encoded.

[yutingc]

Thanks @juneb and @KirkMunro for the suggestions! We will consider adding the rule to verify the encoding.

[gwojan]

Does it have to be UTF-8 with BOM? There are still lots of tools out that that don't handle BOM well.

[rkeithhill]

@KirkMunro You do realize that the PSD1 file generated by New-ModuleManifest is Unicode and not UTF-8? So I don't think it would be such a good idea to require UTF-8 for these files. In general, PowerShell creates Unicode files and not UTF-8 files.

WRT to text files, ASCII files are valid UTF-8 files sans BOM as long as they stick to the range 0x00 - 0x7F.

[KirkMunro]

@rkeithhill: That's odd, and no, I hadn't realized that. ISE saves using UTF-8 by default, as did PowerGUI, and PowerSE. Why would New-ModuleManifest create a UTF-16 file then? I know there were some issues with which encoding was being used in the past, wrt to the editor that was used -- IIRC ISE couldn't open files with certain encodings.

At any rate, you're right, for most cmdlets, the default value for -Encoding is Unicode (UTF-16). There isn't enough consensus here to form a rule for PowerShell files though. Maybe for XML files, since XML's encoding should match the encoding identified inside at the top of the xml file.

[juneb]

My recommendation applied only to help files, which are expected to be UTF-8, not to other file types.

[quoctruong]

The new rule is implemented with #288