What do Asian characters turn into random symbols like " ÐÄ»¨Å·Å " when you save them in a .txt document? How do I convert those symbols back to the original characters?
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Anonymous
ANSWERS: 2
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.txt files generally are 7 or even 8 bit ASCII, and you need Unicode support to display the original characters. You would need to save it in a format that supports Unicode. Often this can be done in rich text (.rtf), several .doc formats, even HTML but some of the above will be dependent upon your local computer's settings. As for how to convert back to the original, you don't. The extra bits per character that defines which Unicode characters they once were were stripped when the file was saved as .txt. That information is gone.
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Not all word processors are capable of handling Unicode. The weird characters are an attempt to render them in whatever they can handle. I will attempt to describe what I mean... If you tell the computer to print out the fourth letter of the alphabet, you would expect a D. Try it in Greek and you will get ⌂ - the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet is Delta. Ask the same program to render the 25th letter of the alphabet and it will bletch; the Greek alphabet only has 24 letters. Computers don't see letters. They see a code number. When you press a key, the computer has no idea what it is; it sees 01100001, the OS translates that to F1 (hexadecimal) and some other program picks up that signal and says, "Oh, my operator wants me to put a lowercase-A on the screen!" When dealing with Unicode or Asian characters though, many programs can't handle them as there are more than 256 of them, so it requires special code to translate properly. Otherwise, it will assume you want two different letters and the results can get a little wonky.
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