Characters turned into question marks - Arabic - Linux

Hi there,
I have CSV file consists of Arabic words and it was working good, but immediately I found all Characters turned into question marks,
Is there any solution for this problem?
Please Help me because this data is critical for me

Thanks for Help

What do you mean under immediately? Immediately after what?

this data is critical for me

Umm, critical really? Did you make a backup copy? Then restore your data from it. Or you did not?

any solution

In order to find one, share a sample file, not a useless screenshot. It is useless, because it only shows that there is a problem but does not give any real clue.

I suspect that you saved your file to a wrong encoding, which means that your data are gone forever. Unless, yes, you have a backup copy. However, until you share a sample file, it is only a guess.

Lessons to learn:

  1. Never work in foreign file formats, only in ODF. And only after you finish your work, export as necessary.
  2. Back up your critical data.
  3. Learn to ask good questions.
3 Likes

What do you mean under immediately? Immediately after what?

after saving file I turned off the device then when I turned on I Found that

Umm, critical really? Did you make a backup copy? Then restore your data from it. Or you did not?

I didn’t make a backup copy with sorry
Sample file.xls (7 KB)

The file you provided is not a CSV file. So what are you asking about really? It contains corrupt data, nothing to recover.

The site is not supports CSV extension
so I Uploaded .xls

Saving alleged broken data in an alien file format does not help anything. If lucky we will get only what you saw as broken, but would need a snippet of the original data (first three lines or so). You can probably attach it with the .txt file name extension instead of .csv, or if that fails zip the csv

Unfortunately .txt and .zip are also prohibited. :slightly_smiling_face:
Change the extension of your .csv file to .xls and then upload.

It seems the input CSV file isn’t saved in UTF-8 encoding. When I import the CSV file saved in UTF8, it is OK.

But if I try to import the CSV file with some old 8-bit encoding (in my test Win-1250), there are the question marks.

I was using Unicode (UTF-8)
and now it’s not working

The UTF8 encoding in import dialog is one thing, but second thing is to have the CSV saved in UFT8.

2 Likes

Try if you accidentally saved it in UTF-16 instead, or worse, some Windows character code page like Arabic (Windows-1256). Or try all others if still not successful.