Shoutbox

Hi,

if we saved an msn conversation in a txt but after opening the file the words are not clear,all the sentences are question marks like this:

???says:
???????
??? says:
????????
?????says:
??? ??? ??

first saved the conversation by selecting "save as" from the file menu but changed the type from "RTF Document" to "Text Document"
then clicked "save" again before closing the conversation box and close the msn then open the notepad file and discover the error! I think the error was because of the second step which is clicking "save"

is there any way to solve this problem and get the text back please
Thanks in advance for your help

is your nick in other languages (e.g. chinese)?
If yes, change the save as type to unicode text document or RTF document instead of text document.
Unicode text document will save all kinds of languages excluding images/text formatting(ie. Color).
RTF document will save all kinds of languages including images/text formatting(ie. Color).
While text document will only save in english, other languages will be converted to ???(like what you are seeing now); images, text formatting will not be saved as well.

Thanks for responding

yeah its not in english and I tried that and change the type but didnt work

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I also tried to open the file with this program but still the same (????) problem!

http://www.editpadpro.com/editpadlite.html

quote:

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Originally posted by Pink
Hi,

if we saved an msn conversation in a txt but after opening the file the words are not clear,all the sentences are question marks like this:

???says:
???????
??? says:
????????
?????says:
??? ??? ??

first saved the conversation by selecting "save as" from the file menu but changed the type from "RTF Document" to "Text Document"
then clicked "save" again before closing the conversation box and close the msn then open the notepad file and discover the error! I think the error was because of the second step which is clicking "save"

---

This isn't an error or bug.

You shouldn't change the character formatting of text from unicode to ASCII if the text contains extended characters.

That is what happened when you changed the format from UTF/Unicode format to "Text document" (which is plain ASCII)...

The questions marks are there because ASCII can not show the extended character set of the unicode text.

If you saved the logs over the original logs, there is no way at all to turn it back. You actually lost all the extended codes.... If you're in luck you've also enabled the conversation logging and Messenger logged the conversations on its own too (check your chat history folder).

You should have choosen "Unicode Text Document" from the save-as menu....

- ASCII are the characters with ascii code 0 to 255 (like used in English and most other Wenstern languages)
- Unicode are the characters used in languages like Chinese, Arabic, etc... they have ascii codes bigger than 255 and thus need more bytes to be saved. (hence also sometimes the name "double byte" character set).

Thanks for your reply
I dont know what happend but when I changed the type of saving the MSN conversation it was "RTF" and I changed it to txt,I did this several times and the file was okay..but this time when I clicked "save" after saving and naming the conversation the file became like this with question marks
and thanks for those info