There are a whole host of blogs on how to encrypt passwords using PowerShell. For the best security, those approaches should be followed, not this approach. I wanted to not include my password and username information in scripts, yet also not go through the setup required for encryption to work (from what I gathered, this encryption is machine and user specific -- not the setup tasks that I wanted to pursue.)
The steps are similar -- create a file with the text coded, then read that file and decode the text to use in the PowerShell script.
PowerShell to code text to a file:
#this is simple obfuscation method for password not appearing as clear text in powershell script
# change the three items below to satisfy your needs
$acc = "myaccount"
$pass = "mypassword"
$filelocation = "E:\folder_where_files_are_saved"
[System.Text.Encoding]::Unicode.GetBytes($acc) | Set-Content $filelocation'\am.txt'
[System.Text.Encoding]::Unicode.GetBytes($pass) | Set-Content $filelocation'\amp.txt'
Then, in a PowerShell script to use the saved files, add these rows to retreive the username and password:
$filelocation = "E:\folder_where_files_are_saved"
# Get username and password from files created by obfuscation method
$gu = Get-Content $filelocation'\am.txt' -ReadCount 0
$username = [system.text.encoding]::Unicode.GetString($gu)
$gp = Get-Content $filelocation'\amp.txt' -ReadCount 0
$password = [system.text.encoding]::Unicode.GetString($gp)