Unicode question marks appear all over my web page after editing it with MS Word?

Question

So I needed to do a quick fix on my site (mostly HTML, nothing fancy) when instead of opening the index.html file with notepad I opened it with MS Word. While the site looked normal on Word, after uploading it all I could see were question marks (unicode) between every character in the file. Is there any way of fixing it, and any good explanation to why this happened?

Answer 1

html files are pure text, and have to be edited as such. They should use UTF-8 encoding, and it's possible your Word is treating them differently, like using encoding iso-8859 or Windows 1252 for example. This can cause all kinds of issues when you're importing a text file.

Answer 2

Open the file from Word, so when you are in Word click File, Open and browse to the HTML file and open it. I can't see why it would be any different if you downloaded the web page with a different browser, as the saved file should be essentially the same whichever browser you use, unless you can't find the file because it saved to a different location, in which case press Ctrl + J in the browser to see your downloads menu and find out where the file is saved to.

Answer 3

The quick fix is to reopen it, paste the code into a plain text editor and upload the page again.