I am most grateful to Data for finally providing a solution to this vexing problem. We were supplied with the attached file and simply told “ASCII is not the only way to represent text.”
Data writes:
Answer:
*It’s in EBCDIC!*
When decoded using EBCDIC it reads:
*CiBt’Bs S0^S0sCeCbCcCdCiCc|*
Essentially, what the clue says is that ASCII, while one of the most common character encoding methods, isn’t the only one.
I checked the file in a hex editor (always a good idea there are some non-printing characters that can’t hide from a hex editor). HxD is one of my fav’s. I changed the encoding from ANSI to ASCII, to Mac and then EBCDIC. If you read every other character, you’ll see that there appears to be a message (reads ‘*it’s 0Ssebcdic*’). Means the encoding is off. Time for a brute force!
A brute force of character sets using https://2cyr.com/decode/?lang=en gives you the option to paste in the source text and click ‘OK’. The ‘Select one:’ dropdown then shows you all of the decoded versions using all known character sets. About 80% the way down, you’ll find 4 entries that read out the message in plain text.
Looks like it’s Code Page 1166 (CP1166).