Question – Fixing problems with the text generated by Whatsapp export chat

I often export my Whatsapp conversations using the “export chat” feature, but the results are quite poor. Whatsapp generates a text file that contains the text of the conversation. Whatsapp replaces the emoticons with some funny Chinese-looking characters. On top of that, my conversations are in Spanish, and Whatsapp replaces the special Spanish characters (like ¿, á or ñ) with yet some more funny Chinese-like characters. Here is an example:

This message in the original conversation has a Spanish special character at the beginning (the ó in López) and an emoticon at the end (????):
López: I haven’t really gone to eat or anything, it was just to rest a bit from Aeris, which was giving me a headache ????

However, the exported text looks like this:
L 贸 fish: I haven’t really gone to eat or anything, it was just to get some rest from Aeris, which was giving me a headache 馃 檲

I have tried opening the file with both Notepad++ and Microsoft Word, and with both I have tried using all the encodings they have available to see if it fixes the problem, but it doesn’t work. For now I am manually replacing the funny symbols with the right ones, but doing that is extremely tedious and time consuming.

Is there a way to fix this?

–

–