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How to output "emoji" characters in UTF-8 from action "Run PowerShell script"?

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

Hello PAD community.

I am facing this "mojibake" problem and want to know how can I avoid it.

In sample desktop flow as below, I expect the output message of PowerShell to contain emoji characters, but it returns "??" symbol instead.

SET Sushi TO $'''🍣 U+1F363'''
SET Beer TO $'''🍺 U+1F37A'''
SET HeavyMultiplicationX TO $'''✖ U+2716'''
Display.ShowMessage Message: $'''Food: %Sushi%
%HeavyMultiplicationX%
Drink: %Beer%''' Icon: Display.Icon.None Buttons: Display.Buttons.OK DefaultButton: Display.DefaultButton.Button1 IsTopMost: False ButtonPressed=> ButtonPressed
System.RunPowershellScript Script: $'''$food = \"%Sushi%\"
$drink = \"%Beer%\"
$multi = \"%HeavyMultiplicationX%\"
$dinner = \"I would like to have $food $multi $drink.\"
Write-Output $dinner''' ScriptOutput=> PowershellOutput ScriptError=> ScriptError

Output text from PowerShell script contains "??" symbol instead of actual "emoji".

I would like to have ?? U+1F363 ? U+2716 ?? U+1F37A.

Is this an expected behavior, or known issue? Are there any workaround to avoid this garbled text?

Thanks in advance.

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Power Automate Desktop

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Highboy 1,185 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Emojis in powershell is not straight forward, and you will never get the emoji icons in the powershell output, as it's text only.
If you would like to read about emojis in powershell, you can go to this link

Just a question, why would you use powershell in you script?

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Hello @Highboy

Thanks for your response.

My original goal was to have a Base64 encoded string to be decoded using a PowerShell script.
The Emojis are contained in a user-created file, and I need to restore the file to its exact original state (binary match required).

Since PAD itself does not provide any action to encode / decode Base64, we have to use an external script written in PowerShell / Python / JavaScript / VBScript.

Since Emojis are just UTF-8 characters, they should be able to be displayed via the standard output of the console if handled properly.

When I experimented, I noticed that the results were different depending on the terminal software used, even if it was the same version of PowerShell.

[Windows PowerShell v5.1]

INPUT: Mojibake
OUTPUT: 4 bytes chars are mojibake, but can display 3 bytes char properly.

[Windows Terminal + Windows PowerShell v5.1]

INPUT: Mojibake
OUTPUT: Can display both 4 bytes chars and 3 bytes char. Looks fine.

[Windows Terminal + PowerShell v7.1.5]

INPUT: Perfect
OUTPUT: Perfect

[PowerShell code]
$food = "🍣 U+1F363"
$drink = "🍺 U+1F37A"
$multi = "✖ U+2716"
$dinner = "I would like to have $food $multi $drink."
Write-Output $dinner

As a workaround for the time being, I have confirmed that no garbled characters are generated in the output string by using VBScript to process Base64 decoding, but I would like to know how I can get the same result in PowerShell.

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