Hi,

I received a text file (readme.txt) from China that is mostly full of symbols - presumably some encoding issue?

How to I go about understanding it? For example one line of text says

ÿ´ÎÔËÐÐ

- so is it possible to decipher this kind of thing? Do I need to translate to Chinese first then use a translator or what?

All ideas much appreciated thnx.

Try installing Notepad++ which has an algorithm that attempts at figuring out what was the original encoding of the text file when opening it.

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v6.9.2.html

If it doesn't work, you can try selecting manually the couple of Chinese encodings available in the 'encoding' menu to see which one works.

edit: When I take the string you sent and paste it in Notepad++ then change encoding to Chinese/GB2312(simplified) I get proper characters with no '???', which is a good sign: 脙驴麓脦脭脣脨脨

Try installing Notepad++ which has an algorithm that attempts at figuring out what was the original encoding of the text file when opening it.

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v6.9.2.html

If it doesn't work, you can try selecting manually the couple of Chinese encodings available in the 'encoding' menu to see which one works.

edit: When I take the string you sent and paste it in Notepad++ then change encoding to Chinese/GB2312(simplified) I get proper characters with no '???', which is a good sign: 脙驴麓脦脭脣脨脨

Thank you so much. This is exactly what I needed and I was able to read the file clearly and copy the Chinese into Google translator, as I cannot read Chinese myself. My problem was I used Textpad as my default text editor and this app doesn't do as Notepad++ did automatically on opening the file. So very easy with Notepad++.

Big thank you!