Help! Can anyone tell me how to fix some corrupted Works files

[kayell]

My daughter emailed me a pile of .wps files zipped to print out for her. They are corrupted - lots of the y character with two dots on top - looks like ASCII character 255 in between every letter she typed. Unfortunately she did not keep backups of the original files. If I could search and replace for this character, it would not be too hard to resurrect the rest of the file, but I can't figure anyway to do a search and replace for this. Any ideas?

[BigMcLargehuge]

1. try opening them in a plain old text editor

what format is .wps? is that MS Works?

When I was going back and forth between Windows and Mac I had the same sort of problem with .rtf files. Sometimes opening them in a text editor did the trick, sometimes I had to search/replace the characters in question....

In my experience it usually happened if the originals were typed with "smart quotes" on.

[kayell]

3. Yup, tried that

in notepad, I get lots of squares instead of those y marks. Any idea how to get rid of the squares?

By the way, I tried repairing the zip files, but that didn't work.

Found a program that will repair works files, and the demo worked, but it will only fix a tiny portion of a file as a sample. The program cost $99, which just isn't possible for either of us right now.

Added: Yes, .wps = Works word processor files.

[slackmaster]

6. You can search and replace the weird characters

I have faced the very same problem and fixed it with Notepad.

Notepad allows you to copy anything into the Windows clipboard including carriage returns, tabs, and characters that don't display as anything readable. The squares (both white and black) Y-things with dots, etc.

You can replace them with nothing, or spaces, or whatever. Expect to do many search-and-replace operations with gradually dimishing returns.

IIRC all of your actual text will be human-readable in Notepad but you'll have to sacrifice all of the formatting and the stuff in the file header. Then import the result into any word processor and fix the formatting.

[Semi_subversive]

2. If they're corrupt

Just have them join the Republican Party.

[kayell]

4. I'd be ROFL if I wasn't so distressed about all her work

I can just about manage a good chuckle though. ;-) :cry:

[JorgeTheGood]

5. Do you have MsWord?

If yes ...

Open the .wps file in word. If it opens then you should be able to save it as a .doc or .wps or whatever filters are available in your version of word.

Just a thought.

Jorge

[kayell]

7. I do have Word 97, and saved a file in it

still getting the nasty little y character, and can't filter it out. Tried putting in the ASCII code into the search box, but Word won't accept it. Does anyone know if any later versions of Word would do this? I could take the files to work, where I have more recent versions available.

[slackmaster]

8. Notepad will allow you to search for ÿ

And all the other funky characters like
, €, Ã, ±, ª, and Î.

So will Wordpad.