Wallet.DAT UTF-16 BE Encoding with Chinese Characters

Hey there. I found an old wallet.dat file and it's encoded in UTF-16 BE, which shows up as Chinese characters on my Windows 11. Any ideas on how I can fix this and get my wallet imported?

Are you opening the file in a text editor like notepad? If so, that's not going to give you anything useful. The wallet.dat file is not a text file and contains lots of binary data that will appear as gibberish in a text editor. Have you tried opening/restoring a copy of it in Bitcoin Core? Bitcoin Core is the only software that can tell you whether the wallet.dat is valid.

Yes. I opened it in notepad. I also opened a different old old wallet file on my andriod device and it's all there and legible. No. I have not opened it or placed it in the Bitcoin Core directory yet. I was reading on how to use the recovery of the file but the Chinese characters threw me off (I have too many old wallet files and concerned about placing more than one wallet in the directory at a time and whether it will corrupt bitcoin core or not). I also have other old wallet files that are behaving similarly. I cannot remember if these were encrypted or not, but they appear to be? What should I do?

You should stop opening weird topics and do this:

Like achow101 and LoyceV said, the only thing that will tell the truth is importing it in Bitcoin Core. For Windows, the steps should be: 1. Make a copy of your wallet.dat. Keep the original file somewhere untouched and perform the actions only on the copied file. 2. Make sure Bitcoin Core is not running. 3. Move the copied wallet file into your Bitcoin installation directory, normally in: `<your homepath>\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin` 4. If you 've already run Bitcoin Core, there should be a wallet.dat already there. 5. My current Bitcoin Core directory shows all my distinct wallets in separate folders. For example, I have 2 folders `walletA` and `walletB` and each of these has a `wallet.dat` inside. 6. Create a directory there like `ChineseStuff` and put the wallet.dat inside. 7. Open Bitcoin Core again. There should be a dropdown on the top right to switch between wallets. If not, make sure to open it by using the top menu. There is an option to "open wallet..." and it will ask for a path.

Use "File->Restore Wallet..." option and the original wallet.dat file will not be altered upon loading, Bitcoin Core will use a copy of it. And with 'Restore', you can set any wallet name that you want to mark your wallets; yes, you can load more than one without issues, one at a time. On a side note, if you don't have enough disk space and planning to sync with "pruned" blockchain, restore all of your wallet.dat files before you start to sync. Given that wallet.dat isn't a text file and by forcing your notepad to open the file; It assumed that the file it opened is a text file so it just encoded the binary data into whatever matching UTF character it can match. So you will see random Chinese characters, numbers or letters. Are you perhaps looking for human-readable string "name" followed by an address that's suggested by some tutorials and guides?