This is a real shot in the dark, however maybe someone had a similar issue. Some console apps are being invoked by either SQL Server 2008, or Autosys (job schedule) under Windows Server 2008; output results of execution are being saved into .txt files. Every so often, with no definite pattern as far as I can tell saved output is displayed as a series of what I presume are Chinese characters. Have anyone encountered phenomenon above?
+1
A:
Typically when you discover chinese characters in output unexpectedly, it's because someone passed a 7-bit or 8-bit character array to an API which expected an array of unicode characters. The system interprets the 8-bit characters as 16 bit unicode characters and they end up being interpreted as unicode characters. At some point later the unicode characters are converted back to 8-bit characters, probably just before they're saved to the text file.
Note: This is an oversimplification but it should be enough to help you figure it out.
Larry Osterman
2010-01-27 02:15:02