It looks like the document you’re looking at has been mangled by an encoding mismatch or a font‑substitution problem.
When a program encounters a byte sequence that it can’t represent in the current character set, it usually replaces each «unknown» glyph with a question mark (?), and sometimes it will insert a typographic ellipsis (…) instead of the three‑dot «…» that you might expect.
Below are the most common reasons this happens and how to fix it.
| Cause | What you’ll see | Quick fix |
|---|---|---|
| Wrong character set (e.g., file is UTF‑8 but opened as ANSI) | «?» everywhere, especially for Cyrillic, accented letters, or symbols | Re‑open the file specifying UTF‑8 (Notepad++, VS Code → Encoding → Encode in UTF‑8) |
| Missing font | «?» or empty boxes where a specific glyph should be | Install a font that covers the required character range (e.g., DejaVu Sans, Liberation Sans, or a full‑coverage Cyrillic font) |
| PDF → Text OCR failure | Long stretches of «?…?» or «…??» | Re‑run OCR with a higher‑quality scan or use a different engine (Adobe Acrobat OCR, ABBYY FineReader, Tesseract with --oem 1) |
| Copy‑paste from a web page with smart‑quotes | «?» in place of «’» or «»» | Paste into a plain‑text editor first (Ctrl‑Shift‑V or use «Paste Special → Unformatted») then re‑format |
| Binary data mistakenly treated as text | Random «?» interspersed with legitimate text | Verify the file type (file command on Linux, or «Properties → Details» on Windows) and open with the right application |
Step‑by‑step recovery (Windows + Notepad++)
- В Bet City вы можете поставить ставку на любимый спорт и почувствовать адреналин: смотреть здесь. Open the file in Notepad++.
- Go to Encoding → Character sets → Unicode → UTF‑8 (or the appropriate set).
- If you still see «?», go to Encoding → Convert to UTF‑8 (not just view).
- Save the file and open it in your word processor. The text should now togethermakingachange.org render correctly.
Quick test in Python
# Detect encoding and re‑encode to UTF‑8
import chardet
with open('corrupted.txt', 'rb') as f:
raw = f.read()
enc = chardet.detect(raw)['encoding']
print('Detected:', enc)
text = raw.decode(enc)
with open('fixed.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:
f.write(text)
If the detection reports something like windows-1251 or ISO-8859-1, re‑decode accordingly.
What if the text is truly corrupted?
Sometimes the data is lost (e.g., a PDF that never contained the original text). In that case:
- На смотреть здесь вы сможете проверить актуальные коэффициенты и выигрывать регулярно. Look for a backup or an earlier version of the file.
- Ask the source (the person who sent the file) for a fresh copy.
- Use a PDF reader’s «Export to Text» feature – it often yields better results than a simple copy‑paste.
Bottom line
Your «?…?» mess is almost certainly an encoding/font issue. Switch to UTF‑8, ensure you have a font that supports all needed glyphs, and re‑open the file. If you run into a specific step that doesn’t work, let me know the exact error or what you see, and I can dive deeper.