Showing and Editing the Content of a File - Windows Terminal

Using the Terminal on Windows Philipp Acsany 00:55

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Discussion (2)

00:00 Also, I trusted you that you actually put the content into the hello_terminal file. Right, I’m having doubts now. I wonder, yeah. I don’t want to introduce any— Can you? Yes, I can. There is a command called cat, which allows me to take in—it basically outputs the content of a file. And I’ll actually share a quick trick, which is I’ve just put in hello here, and I know there’s a file called hello_terminal. We can actually just list (ls) just to confirm that, and you can see the hello_terminal is there, and if I cat hello, and then I press the Tab button, it will auto-fill the path for me, and so that can just save a bit of typing.

00:40 I use tab auto-completion all the time. Okay. Yeah. And if we run this, you’ll see that it outputs the content of that file, which is what I expected it to be, so I’m happy with that.

emru67 on Jan. 18, 2024

Hi, this is what I get:

PS D:\programming\python\tests\pb_terminal> echo “print(‘Hello, Terminal!’)” > hello_terminal.py

PS D:\programming\python\tests\pb_terminal> cat hello_terminal.py print(‘Hello, Terminal!’)

PS D:\programming\python\tests\pb_terminal> python hello_terminal.py

SyntaxError: Non-UTF-8 code starting with ‘\xff’ in file D:\programming\python\tests\pb_terminal\hello_terminal.py on line 1, but no encoding declared; see peps.python.org/pep-0263/ for details

PS D:\programming\python\tests\pb_terminal> python .\hello_terminal.py

SyntaxError: Non-UTF-8 code starting with ‘\xff’ in file D:\programming\python\tests\pb_terminal\hello_terminal.py on line 1, but no encoding declared; see peps.python.org/pep-0263/ for details

What am I doing wrong? If I get it right is and encoding problem? This is what I found:

Microsoft compilers and interpreters, and many pieces of software on Microsoft Windows such as Notepad (prior to Windows 10 Build 1903[12]) treat the BOM as a required magic number rather than use heuristics. These tools add a BOM when saving text as UTF-8, and cannot interpret UTF-8 unless the BOM is present or the file contains only ASCII. Windows PowerShell (up to 5.1) will add a BOM when it saves UTF-8 XML documents. However, PowerShell Core 6 has added a -Encoding switch on some cmdlets called utf8NoBOM so that document can be saved without BOM. Google Docs also adds a BOM when converting a document to a plain text file for download.(Wikipedia)

But I’m still unsure of what it means and don’t know how to fix it… Thank you

emru67 on Jan. 19, 2024

My apologies…

I had to download and install Power Shell 7…now it all works as expected…

Sorry

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