Question:
I’ve got a huge XML file (0.5 GB), with no line breaks. I want to be able to look at, say, the first 200 characters without opening the whole file. Is there a way to do this with PowerShell?
Answer:
PowerShell Desktop (up to 5.1)
You can read at the byte level with Get-Content like so:
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$bytes = Get-Content .\files.txt -Encoding byte -TotalCount 200 [System.Text.Encoding]::Unicode.GetString($bytes) |
If the log file is ASCII you can simplify this to:
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[char[]](Get-Content .\files.txt -Encoding byte -TotalCount 200) |
PowerShell Core 6.0 and newer
PowerShell Core doesn’t support byte encoding. It’s been replaced by -AsByteStream parameter.
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$bytes = Get-Content .\file.txt -AsByteStream -TotalCount 200 [System.Text.Encoding]::Unicode.GetString($bytes) |