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When saving the text "Bush hid the facts" in notepad under Windows XP, how come when you reopen it shows squares instead of the text?

I saw it in this video if you need an example

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bK9-sc_uus&feature=related

1 Answers1

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This is due to a problem with the Win32 API function IsTextUnicode dating back to Windows NT 3.5. If a file is encoded in ANSI, the function will interpret it as UTF-16LE resulting in unreadable characters.

This fascinated me too back when I discovered it since I was kind of young and naive, I thought it was an actual conspiracy :)

There is actually a Wikipedia article on this you can find here.