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about_Special_Characters

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Short description

Describes the special character sequences that control how PowerShell interprets the next characters in the sequence.

Long description

PowerShell supports a set of special character sequences that are used to represent characters that aren't part of the standard character set. The sequences are commonly known as escape sequences.

Escape sequences begin with the backtick character, known as the grave accent (ASCII 96), and are case-sensitive. The backtick character can also be referred to as the escape character.

Escape sequences are only interpreted when contained in double-quoted (") strings.

PowerShell recognizes these escape sequences:

Sequence Description
`0 Null
`a Alert
`b Backspace
`e Escape (added in PowerShell 6)
`f Form feed
`n New line
`r Carriage return
`t Horizontal tab
`u{x} Unicode escape sequence (added in PowerShell 6)
`v Vertical tab

PowerShell also has a special token to mark where you want parsing to stop. All characters that follow this token are used as literal values that aren't interpreted.

Special parsing tokens:

Sequence Description
-- Treat the remaining values as arguments not parameters
--% Stop parsing anything that follows
~ Tilde

Null (`0)

The null (`0) character appears as an empty space in PowerShell output. This functionality allows you to use PowerShell to read and process text files that use null characters, such as string termination or record termination indicators. The null special character isn't equivalent to the $null variable, which stores a null value.

Alert (`a)

The alert (`a) character sends a beep signal to the computer's speaker. You can use this character to warn a user about an impending action. The following example sends two beep signals to the local computer's speaker.

for ($i = 0; $i -le 1; $i++){"`a"}

Backspace (`b)

The backspace (`b) character moves the cursor back one character, but it doesn't delete any characters.

The example writes the word backup and then moves the cursor back twice. Then, at the new position, writes a space followed by the word out.

"backup`b`b out"

back out

Escape (`e)

Note

This special character was added in PowerShell 6.0.

The escape (`e) character is most commonly used to specify a virtual terminal sequence (ANSI escape sequence) that modifies the color of text and other text attributes such as bolding and underlining. These sequences can also be used for cursor positioning and scrolling. The PowerShell host must support virtual terminal sequences. You can check the boolean value of $Host.UI.SupportsVirtualTerminal to determine if these ANSI sequences are supported.

For more information about ANSI escape sequences, see the ANSI escape code article in Wikipedia.

The following example outputs text with a green foreground color.

$fgColor = 32 # green
"`e[${fgColor}mGreen text`e[0m"

Green text

Form feed (`f)

The form feed (`f) character is a print instruction that ejects the current page and continues printing on the next page. The form feed character only affects printed documents. It doesn't affect screen output.

New line (`n)

The new line (`n) character inserts a line break immediately after the character.

This example shows how to use the new line character to create line breaks in a Write-Host command.

"There are two line breaks to create a blank line`n`nbetween the words."

There are two line breaks to create a blank line

between the words.

Carriage return (`r)

The carriage return (`r) character moves the output cursor to the beginning of the current line and continues writing. Any characters on the current line are overwritten.

In this example, the text before the carriage return is overwritten.

Write-Host "These characters are overwritten.`rI want this text instead "

Notice that the text before the `r character isn't deleted, it's overwritten.

I want this text instead written.

Horizontal tab (`t)

The horizontal tab (`t) character advances to the next tab stop and continues writing at that point. By default, the PowerShell console has a tab stop at every eighth space.

This example inserts two tabs between each column.

"Column1`t`tColumn2`t`tColumn3"

Column1         Column2         Column3

Unicode character (`u{x})

Note

This special character was added in PowerShell 6.0.

The Unicode escape sequence (`u{x}) allows you to specify any Unicode character by the hexadecimal representation of its code point. This includes Unicode characters above the Basic Multilingual Plane (> 0xFFFF) which includes emoji characters such as the thumbs up (`u{1F44D}) character. The Unicode escape sequence requires at least one hexadecimal digit and supports up to six hexadecimal digits. The maximum hexadecimal value for the sequence is 10FFFF.

This example outputs the up down arrow (↕) symbol.

"`u{2195}"

Vertical tab (`v)

The vertical tab (`v) character advances to the next vertical tab stop and writes the remaining output at that point. The rendering of the vertical tab is device and terminal dependent.

Write-Host "There is a vertical tab`vbetween the words."

The following examples show the rendered output of the vertical tab in some common environments.

The Windows Console host application interprets (`v) as a special character with no extra spacing added.

There is a vertical tab♂between the words.

The Windows Terminal renders the vertical tab character as a carriage return and line feed. The rest of the output is printed at the beginning of the next line.

There is a vertical tab
between the words.

On printers or in a unix-based consoles, the vertical tab character advances to the next line and writes the remaining output at that point.

There is a vertical tab
                       between the words.

Line continuation

The backtick character can also be used at the end of a line as a signal to the PowerShell parser that the command continues on the next line. For more information, see about_Parsing.

The end-of-parameters token (--)

The end-of-parameters token (--) indicates that all arguments following it are to be passed in their actual form as though double quotes were placed around them. For example, using -- you can output the string -InputObject without using quotes or having it interpreted as a parameter:

Write-Output -- -InputObject

-InputObject

This is a convention specified in the POSIX Shell and Utilities specification.

Stop-parsing token (--%)

The stop-parsing (--%) token prevents PowerShell from interpreting strings as PowerShell commands and expressions. This allows those strings to be passed to other programs for interpretation.

Place the stop-parsing token after the program name and before program arguments that might cause errors.

In this example, the Icacls command uses the stop-parsing token.

icacls X:\VMS --% /grant Dom\HVAdmin:(CI)(OI)F

PowerShell sends the following string to Icacls.

X:\VMS /grant Dom\HVAdmin:(CI)(OI)F

In this second example, we pass the variable $HOME to the cmd.exe /c echo command twice.

cmd.exe /c echo $HOME --% $HOME

The output shows that the first instance of $HOME is interpreted by PowerShell so that the value of the variable is passed to cmd. The second instance of $HOME comes after the stop-parsing token, so it is passed as a literal string.

C:\Users\username  $HOME

For more information about the stop-parsing token, see about_Parsing.

Tilde (~)

The tilde character (~) has special meaning in PowerShell. When it's used with PowerShell commands at the beginning of a path, PowerShell expands the tilde character to the user's home directory. If you use the tilde character anywhere else in a path, it's treated as a literal character.

For more information about the stop-parsing token, see about_Parsing.

See also