Make sure that the text source file is assured to be complete simple 8 bit ASCII. If you happened to use a Chinese text editor to make the source text file it is possible that you may have inadvertantly embedded either an encoded Chinese text character into the file. In the Chinese text editors I have seen there are ASCII character mappings to several pages of the standardized Chinese font table that would appear in the source file as looking like plain ASCII characters whilest they could actually end up in the text file as multi-byte page/offset encoded Chinese characters.

For those unfamiliar with encoded Chinese Text files note that it is a scheme to use a normal 8-bit type text file wherein ASCII characters are normally encoded and that special multi-byte sequences are used to encode Chinese characters. The techniques used pre-date the Unicode type 16-bit files that are becoming into use these days.

Michael Karas