How can I store Windows "tree" command output in a file and retrieve it again?

Question

When I do a tree > somefile.txt the file indeed contains the output of the tree command, but the lines drawn in the console are displayed as accented letters ÃÄÄÄ.

Which encoding or mode do I have to use to display such an output file correctly and which editor can do it?

Answer 1

treesupports the /a switch which uses regular ASCII:

D:\>tree /a
Folder PATH listing for volume Win7
Volume serial number is BA60-7CCB
D:.
+---3rd
|   +---Android
|   |   +---android-ndk-r5
|   |   |   +---build
|   |   |   |   +---awk
|   |   |   |   +---core
|   |   |   |   +---gmsl
|   |   |   |   \---tools

Answer 2

It probably uses the line-drawing characters in code page 850.

Notepad doesn't support that encoding, it's default is "ANSI", by which Microsoft mean Windows-Latin1 or Code-Page-1252 if I remember correctly.

Notepad++ or gVim etc should be able to display the characters correctly.

Answer 3

TL;DR

I am trying to figure out what I said long ago in so many words.

Sounds like, it's hopeless, maybe try a /U switch, even shell redirection won't save you, maybe just convert it using another program.

Original

In Notepad++, I was able to read them when selecting the "Encoding" under "Character Sets" > "Western European" > "OEM-US".

After that I could select "Encoding" > "Convert to UTF-8", so I could transfer them in a format that hopefully everyone else would be able to read.

For reference, my system is Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit(x64), with my current system locale set to "English (United States)".

Also, I believe this question has more information and is higher rated: Saving 'tree /f /a" results to a textfile with unicode support

I also run my Command Prompt with the "/U" option (through ConEmu if that matters), and an answer on that page had stated: Either that does not function as expected, or the tree command does not respect it for some reason.

I have now found this excerpt from the following source, that may explain why the tree command does not write Unicode-encoded text to a file:

Output UNICODE characters (UCS-2 le)
These options will affect piping or redirecting to a file.
Most common text files are ANSI, use these switches
when you need to convert the character set.

In my environment however, I have used output redirector character > to write to a file, so the command is not doing this itself, and the output was still not encoded in a Unicode format.

Answer 4

Try Code page 437.

In Sublime Text 3, I was able to view the output, including the graphical ASCII characters, with "Reopen with Encoding" > "DOS (CP 437)".

After selecting that code page, the file was rendered with the graphical ASCII characters like this: Example Image of what the graphical characters look like.