Encrypted file has different encoding

[s-horbach]

Hi Dear SOPS community 👋

I have values.yaml file, which contains the values for my helm charts. The file itself is in UTF-8, but when I encrypt it the resulted file has UTF-16 LE BOM encoding.

Is there any way how to preserve UTF-8 encoding in this case?

[felixfontein]

Hi, can you provide more information, like which operating system you are using (I assume Windows?), and which store (output format) you are using? I'm not aware of SOPS using anything else than UTF-8, but that of course could be because some library used for some format uses UTF-16 LE BOM under certain circumstances (like a specific platform).

[s-horbach]

Hi, thanks for a quick reply:

• OS is Windows 11
• store - i don't set any specific option for this, but just specify an output file name - values.local.enc.yaml
• SOPS is v3.9.3 or v3.9.4

For instance here is a command I use:
sops encrypt --azure-kv <azure KV URL> --encrypted-regex '(?i)^(.*secret.*|.*password.*|.*connectionString.*|.*privateKey.*)$' values.local.yaml > values.local.enc.yaml

PS i've also tried it out without --encrypted-regex flag, but that didn't help

[s-horbach]

The issue was in PowerShell, where i ran the command - by default it uses UTF-16 when the command output is redirected to a file, for instance: values.local.yaml > values.local.enc.yaml (more details: Changing PowerShell's default output encoding to UTF-8)

When i run exactly the same command in cmd.exe or just use --output flag - it works as expected.

[felixfontein]

I'm glad you figured this out!