Why Do My Keystrokes Turn into Crazy Characters After I Dump a Bunch of Binary Data into My Terminal

Do I need to escape echo'd strings for console output?

The shell interpretes commands from stdin but you are writing to stdout. So everything is fine

However, to prevent you from accidently copy pasting them into a terminal it is never a bad idea to escape them

Why is my byte array returned from fread smaller than the number of bytes in the file itself when it includes unicode special symbols?

The ₀ symbol is three bytes long with a UTF-8 encoding (0xE2 0x82 0x80). And internal to MATLAB, it's actually two bytes due to a UTF-16 encoding (0x80 0x20 little-endian).

However, since a precision of *char was given to fread, the returned data is returned as a char array¹. And to a char array, regardless of the underlying encoding, ₀ is simply a single character when considering its size:

If A is a character vector of type char, then size returns the row vector [1 M] where M is the number of characters.

¹ I'm assuming the strong assertion of matching matrix size from fread if sizeA is given (per the documentation) is only valid for numeric data since, as may be evident above, byte count and character count are not necessarily one-to-one.

Why does Git treat this text file as a binary file?

It simply means that when git inspects the actual content of the file (it doesn't know that any given extension is not a binary file - you can use the attributes file if you want to tell it explicitly - see the man pages).

Having inspected the file's contents it has seen stuff that isn't in basic ascii characters. Being UTF16 I expect that it will have 'funny' characters so it thinks it's binary.

There are ways of telling git if you have internationalisation (i18n) or extended character formats for the file. I'm not sufficiently up on the exact method for setting that - you may need to RT[Full]M ;-)

Edit: a quick search of SO found can-i-make-git-recognize-a-utf-16-file-as-text which should give you a few clues.

See NSUserDefaults file content

I'm able to open the file using "pico" but it shows weird characters.

Because as an optimization (storage space and read/write speed) iOS stores property list files in the binary format. You need to convert it to XML format using

plutil -convert xml1 com.yourapp.bundleid.plist

After this, you'll be able to see a meaningful result when opened in a text editor (such as Pico).

Linux Terminal: typing feedback gone, line breaks not displayed

Execute the command reset and your terminal should be restored (reference).

This issue happens generally when dumping binary data to the terminal STDOUT which when the escape codes received are processed can do anything from change the color of the text, disable echo, even change character set.

The easy way to avoid this is to ensure you do not dump unknown binary data to the terminal, and if you must then convert it to hexadecimal to ensure it doesn't change the terminal settings.

Convert ^M (Windows) line breaks to normal line breaks

This is the only thing that worked for me:

:e ++ff=dos

Found it at: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/File_format