Manual edits of Package.xml possible? What is the function of "ÿ" in the file?

[steadybird]

Hi Team,

I am looking to grab copies of our PMPC deployed items and throw them at some servers with custom login scripts. Unfortunately the CIO veto'd my idea to implement WSUS and we don't have the budget for SCCM... So I am having to perform alternatives.

I wanted to make some customisations to the deployment and thought I could do so via amendments to the Package.xml. Reviewing the file it seems straight forward enough but I am wondering around the "ÿ" I see at the end of each argument.

This looks to be something that doesn't render natively in utf-8 so I worry if I make edits to the file will the PMPC scriptrunner still understand Package.xml.

What happens if I remove the "ÿ"?
What happens if in an existing Package.xml that does not include a specific argument, I manually insert a copy sourced from another file and abide by the syntax?

[Andrew Jimenez (Patch My PC)]

You definitely need to keep the ÿ it is used as a separator for all the values passed to scriptrunner.
You should be able to manually modify package.xml, as long as it gets all of the values it expects it should work fine.

[steadybird]

So I should be able to copy and paste that ensuring it's between each argument and I should be golden?

Wasn't sure if my copying and pasting might impact that characters encoding and cause it not to work.

[Andrew Jimenez (Patch My PC)]

Yep, it should work!
We of course can't officially support any apps with manually created package.xml files, but you are free to modify them as you need.