What does a question mark in a circle mean when looking at text?

jwilliams31 · 11-11-2012, 07:07 AM

I have a file that I'm looking through. It's actually a dictionary file for a class. When I cat the file or look at it in an editor, there are some characters that look like a question mark in a circle.

What does this mean? How do I fix it?

Thank you.

Jason

bigrigdriver · 11-11-2012, 07:24 AM

I would hazard to guess that the editor has encountered a character code that it is unable to interpret correctly, and substitutes the symbol in place of the character.

Perhaps it's a file intended to be viewed graphically (as in a browser) instead of textually in an editor.

DavidMcCann · 11-11-2012, 10:37 AM

This is used in Unicode to indicate a code that's simply not part of the system, as opposed to something that just can't be displayed (like a character you don't have or a control code).

It might be that your text is in UTF-16 instead of the required UTF-8. You can open a text file using Firefox and then use "View - Character encoding" to try various options until everything displays properly. Once you know what you're looking at, you can convert the file (if you don't want to read it in Firefox) with the iconv command.