No additional UDF is required - just the change to the PowerShell command to force ASCII and things will work "normally". I just pointed out that the FileIO UDF is faster than FSO in most cases.. in this case, it was over 3x faster. OF course, when it takes several seconds to instantiate PowerShell, saving 300ms is not a game-changer. 
I did test the code here with both FSO read and FileIO, which is how I found that it was 300ms faster. FileIO is my go-to UDF for file management - every line is an array record, and the same function can read, append, or write to a file.
Glenn
_________________________
Actually I
am a Rocket Scientist!
