Sometimes when I try to open a non-text file as if it were a text file, I notice that it shows up with question marks and weird symbols, including some Chinese characters. I'm curious about how these characters can appear when I open a file that's not meant to be read as text. What's going on behind the scenes that leads to this situation?
5 Answers
This situation is known as "Mojibake," where the wrong encoding is used, causing garbled text to appear. The original characters don’t have a direct representation in the misapplied encoding, so what you see instead are those weird symbols or question marks! Make sure to check the encoding format when sharing files to prevent this issue!
When you open a file that isn't a standard text file, your text editor tries to interpret the binary data in the file as text. As a result, the characters you're seeing, like the Chinese symbols and other strange characters, are just random bits of binary that, when incorrectly interpreted, match up to those visual symbols in character encodings like ASCII or Unicode. It’s really just the software misreading what's inside the file!
The real question is, why didn’t Bush just explain it more clearly? Haha, but seriously, it’s a technical issue that many people run into when file types get mixed up!
Ultimately, it all comes down to how bytes match up with characters in Unicode. When the byte arrangement doesn’t align with the expected character representation, confusion leads to those odd characters popping up.
To put it simply, every piece of data on your computer is stored as binary. Text files are broken down into bytes that represent characters based on certain character encodings (like UTF-8). If you open a file with the wrong program, the software might decode those bytes incorrectly—leading to strange symbols like Chinese characters appearing. Essentially, the program is just guessing how to read that data, and when it guesses wrong, you get the weird output!
Exactly! It's crucial for each file to be opened with the right program so that the data can be understood correctly. When there’s a mismatch, chaos ensues!
Lol, Mojibake is such a funny word for it! It's super easy to run into that if you're not careful, especially with all the different character sets out there.