If the characters in imported text look wrong, that may be due to a mismatch between the character encoding used in the text and the one used to import it.

Create a text file with an unusual encoding

Create a text file with MacintoshChineseTraditional-encoded characters:

Attempt to import the text

Import the text using the default character encoding. Because the default encoding is not MacintoshChineseTraditional, the texts characters are not interpreted correctly:

Import the text specifying the character encoding

Specify that the file uses MacintoshChineseTraditional encoding. The file imports correctly:

Notes

The complete list of character encodings that you can use is given by $CharacterEncodings: