How come notepad sometimes displays encrypted data as boxes sometimes not?

[wtf]

but if I open it with dos edit command, it will be the ordinary ascii characters?

sometimes though it looks like the full range of ascii characters. funny thing is though even sometimes when I encrypt something with the exact same key it will look different when opened in notepad.... (but it will still decrypt the same. )

Why is this?

[helios]

It may be interpreting the text as Unicode. See what happens when you try to open a text file containing only

bush hid the facts

in notepad.

[wtf]

huh?
are you joking? or did the NSA erase what you were going to say and replace it with "bush hid the facts"?

I guess Obama is still gonna blame bush for everything when his health care proposals fails.

[wtf]

what the? what the heck? what the?
omg! what the?

[wtf]

wow thats cool.

but ok nope. I tried opening my encrypted.txt as ansi and it still shows a bunch of boxes.

[wtf]

but I guess It works when I open it in wordpad.

[helios]

I think the phrase would refer to Bush Sr. if it was serious.

Anyway, you shouldn't be using notepad. Or Wordpad. Actually, you shouldn't be using any text editor to read binary data. Here's a fine free hex editor: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hexplorer/

What sort of "boxes" are you seeing?