How can I make PowerShell handle [ or ] in file name well?

Indeed, use of the -LiteralPath parameter is the best solution (in PowerShell [Core] v6+, you can shorten to -lp):

$content = Get-Content -LiteralPath $i.Fullname

-LiteralPath ensures that $i.Fullname is taken verbatim (literally); that is, [ and ] in the path are interpreted as themselves rather than having special meaning (see below).


As for what you tried:

$content = Get-Content $i.Fullname

is effectively the same as:

$content = Get-Content -Path $i.Fullname

That is, the (first) positional argument passed to Get-Content is implicitly bound to the
-Path parameter
.

The -Path parameter accepts wildcard expressions to allow matching paths by patterns; in addition to support for * (any run of characters) and ? (exactly 1 character), [...] inside a wildcard pattern denotes a character set or range (e.g., [12] or [0-9]).

Therefore an actual path that contains [...], e.g., foo[10].txt, is not recognized as such, because the [10] is interpreted as a character set matching a single character that is either 1 or 0; that is foo[10].txt would match foo0.txt and foo1.txt, but not a file literally named foo[10].txt.

When (implicitly) using -Path, it is possible to escape [ and ] instances that should be interpreted verbatim, namely via the backtick (`), but note that this can get tricky to get right when quoting and/or variable references are involved.

If you know a path to be a literal path, it is best to form a habit of using -LiteralPath (which in PowerShell Core you can shorten to -lp).

However, if your path contains literal [ and ] and you also need wildcard matching, you must use `-escaping – see this answer.

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