Arabic text shows strange characters الÙباى انگليسى ØŒ

Question

I have Arabic text (.sql pure text). When I view it in any document, it shows like this:

حر٠اول الÙباى انگليسى ØŒ حر٠اضاÙÙ‡ مثبت

But when I use an HTML document with <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>, it shows properly like this:

حرف اول الفباى انگليسى ، حرف اضافه مثبت

How can I convert it to readable text?

Answer 1

The Arabic text has been encoded to bytes using UTF-8.

You are explicitly telling the HTML document that the bytes are encoded in UTF-8, which is why any HTML viewer will be able to display the text correctly.

However, any other text viewer will not know the bytes are encoded in UTF-8, unless you put a UTF-8 BOM in front of the text, and the viewer supports BOMs. Otherwise, as you are seeing, a text viewer may instead interpret the bytes in Latin-1 or similar encoding instead. So, you would have to manually tell the text viewer to interpret the bytes as UTF-8 instead. But how you actually do that depends on the particular text viewer you are using. Not all viewers offer this option.