Chef provisioner creating invalid knife.rb in Windows?

[Stephen Opalenski]

I think I'm running into a problem packing a Windows instance with a Chef provider where the knife.rb file being generated appears to be encoded as the standard Windows UTF-16 with a BOM which causes Chef to choke because Chef is expecting a UTF-8 encoded file. 

 amazon: [2017-09-20T13:38:54-04:00] INFO: Chef Run complete in 343.626122 seconds

    amazon: [2017-09-20T13:38:54-04:00] INFO: Running report handlers

    amazon: [2017-09-20T13:38:54-04:00] INFO: Report handlers complete

    amazon: Creating configuration file 'knife.rb'

==> amazon: Cleaning up chef node...

    amazon: ERROR: CONFIGURATION ERROR:You have invalid ruby syntax in your config file C:/Windows/Temp/packer-chef-client/knife.rb

    amazon:

    amazon: SyntaxError: C:/Windows/Temp/packer-chef-client/knife.rb:1: invalid multibyte char (UTF-8)

    amazon: Relevant file content:

    amazon:   1: ▒▒

==> amazon: Terminating the source AWS instance...

==> amazon: Cleaning up any extra volumes...

==> amazon: No volumes to clean up, skipping

==> amazon: Deleting temporary keypair...

I am running this with Packer 1.1.0, but with an older Chef of 12.19.36 due to various cookbook problems. 

I am assuming Packer is generating the knife.rb file. 

1. Is this correct? 

2. Any idea on how I could change the encoding of the knife file?

Regards,

Steve