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Invoke-WebRequest's .ToString() assumes content is ASCII #27154
Description
Prerequisites
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Steps to reproduce
When you call .ToString() on a response from Invoke-WebRequest the code here assumes ascii in the content body
If the content is non-ascii this causes characters to be converted to '???'
Expected behavior
Non-ascii characters in the response body remain unchangedActual behavior
Non-ascii characters become '???'Error details
Environment data
Name Value
---- -----
PSVersion 7.6.0
PSEdition Core
GitCommitId 7.6.0
OS Microsoft Windows 10.0.22631
Platform Win32NT
PSCompatibleVersions {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…}
PSRemotingProtocolVersion 2.4
SerializationVersion 1.1.0.1
WSManStackVersion 3.0Visuals
No response
Activity
TobiasPSP commentedon May 6, 2026
toString() is a fuzzy "preview" function, not the recommended way to process production data. The challenge is: with text and non-BOM-encoding, there is no way other than heuristically to determine the original encoding.
So toString() must pick one encoding in random best effort. Or is there a reliable HTTP header information that reveals the encoding? I am not much of a HTTP expert I admit.
SteveL-MSFT commentedon Jul 15, 2026
@PowerShell/wg-powershell-cmdlets discussed this. We believe in most cases the encoding should be available as part of the header. If not, it would make sense to default to utf-8 instead of ASCII.