Strange characters ^? in fasta format sequence file

Question

[860101959]

Recently, I received a fasta format sequence file from one of my colleges, But there are some strange characters like ^? in the sequence , does anyone knows why and how can I delete these characters? Because there are a lot of ^? in sequences and I don't want to delete manually.

I tried to recognize these characters using vim by \^\? , ^? or \^? but failed. Since the data is output of MEGA maybe there is some reasons in there.

The sequence is like this: ^?MRATGEKRVLQLHELDEFCLDSYENAKIYKEKTERWHNRHIREKEIEVGQQVLMFNSHLKLFSGKLKSRWSGSFTVVAVFPHSKLERIAEDLLIE

Answer 1

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

what is the output of

file your.fasta

must be : ASCII test

[lieven.sterck]

apart from Pierre Lindenbaum remark, does the file contain the typical fasta header lines (starting with > followed by some text denoting the sequence ID/name) ?

[860101959]

Thanks, I think it is encoding problem.

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

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