Soul files and histories contain apostrophes, dashes, symbols, and long natural-language passages. Opening UTF-8 bytes under the wrong code page can produce visible damage even though the original file remains valid.
Copying the damaged display into another file makes the corruption real. Diagnosis therefore compares the raw file, declared encoding, JSON parse result, and the specific rendering path.
What was actually going wrong
A garbled editor or export view was accepted as evidence that identity content had changed.
What I tried
- Manually replacing every suspicious character
- Saving through the same incorrectly detected encoding
- Comparing screenshots instead of parsed strings
Files are decoded explicitly as UTF-8, parsed before editing, and compared at the string or byte level against the source.
Why it worked
The test separates storage corruption from a display-layer decoding mistake.
Verify bytes and encoding before repairing meaningful text.
Where EACI uses this today
Main soul and history maintenance treats encoding faults as infrastructure evidence first.
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