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When I saved a text file using a notepad with ANSI, I lost all of the information since it became all question marks. Is there a way to convert it back to Unicode to retrieve the text?

Oliver Salzburg
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3 Answers3

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Once the characters are converted to ? marks they cannot be converted back: a ? mark is just a ? mark, it doesn't know where it came from. If you replace all the letters a, b, c in a text with x, you cannot restore the original a, b, c letters.

Your only option is to recover from a previous copy if you have one.

janos
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You can try to open your text document in notepad++. As commented by @cartographer

Go to encoding menu and chose Encode in UTF-8 option.

It may help you to retrieve your text back.

Or you can try with all options, may some encoding format convert your text to origional one . :)

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If you write a text document in UTF-8, you must save it as UTF-8 otherwise this happens.

So no, you have to restart whatever you did.

xR34P3Rx
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