CSV in bad Encoding

Question

We have uploaded a file with bad encoding now when downloading it again all the "strange" French characters are mixed up.

Example of the bad text:

R�union

Now when opening the CSV with Openoffice we tried all of the encodings in the Dropdown none of them seem to work.

Anyone have a way to fix the encoding to the correct one that we can view the chars?

Links to file https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwgeuQK3LAFRWkJuNHd2TlF2WjQ/view?usp=sharing

Kr.

He probably tried opening it via Excel. – FastSolutions Sep 15 '15 at 13:00 — FastSolutions, Sep 15 '15 at 13:00
Colleague who is on holiday and I need to clean up. – FastSolutions Sep 15 '15 at 13:03 — FastSolutions, Sep 15 '15 at 13:03

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:06

Sadly there is no way to automatically fix the linked file. Consider the two words afectación and sécurité. In the file they have been converted incorrectly to afectaci?n and s?curit?. There is no way to convert the question marks back because sometimes they're ó and other times é.

(Actually instead of question marks the file uses the unicode replacement character, but that doesn't change the problem).

Hopefully you have an earlier version of the file that has not been converted incorrectly.

Next time try to use a consistent encoding. This question gives some suggestions for how to do this.

If the original data cannot be obtained, there is one thing that could be done outside of retyping the whole thing. It is possible to use dictionary lookups to guess the missing words. However this would be a difficult project, and there would be mistakes where incorrect guesses were made. It's probably not worth it.

CSV in bad Encoding

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