Someone sent me a text file. Although I can read most of the document, sometimes there are unusual characters. When I open it in VIM, I see <92> in it's place. When I use gedit, i see a character that looks like a square with two zeros and 9 and 4 in the square.
Is there a way to decode these funny characters back to their human readable equivalent?
I also ran the following in shell:
johncomputer> file --mime-encoding file.txt
johncomputer> file.txt: : utf-8
SO i think it's utf8 encoded.
Oh and also, this is a text document where most characters are read-able. Just some (not all) of the accented characters are showing up weird.
Best Answer
The odds are that what you see as <92> and <94> are windows-1252 encoded “smart” (curly) apostrophe and “smart” right double quotation mark. They could be just about anything, of course, but in UTF-8, such bytes cannot appear as “standalone”, only as the 2nd or later byte of a multi-byte representation of a character,