What is the 'Face' char?

I have been looking at a file and saw this weird face character.

Only a question, do you have additional languages installed? Did you create or name the file? Could be machine language or corruption. I'd run SFC /SCANNOW and in File Explorer right-click the drive the file is on and Properties, Tools tab and run Error checking.

Not all files are meant to be opened in a text editor. It's probably interpreting it as unicode and that looks like some Asian language character

This is a very old bug with the Windows text display. Some arbitrary non-ASCII byte sequences trick it into switching to Unicode, and random byte pairs display as Asian characters. It commonly happens with registry entries.

MS has always known about this glitch, but they don't fix it because that might introduce a new bug. Within the dev community, it's known behavior and ignored.

It is in a corrupted file, a line of text.
It used to part of a chinese text string using a windows chinese code page from several years ago.
And I had set that PC to use English and simplified Chinese text as an experiment to see how unicode chinese could work in non unicode programs.

So for some reason it turned something into ? and others into that .

Notepad++ has some odd looking chars too when showing the string. No question marks but nothing recognizable.

I was wondering if today a visual studio app could see the text properly, but it can't.