I encountered this weird problem of which I am not sure why and how it happens, if it is a bug or just due to undefined behaviour as WinSCP is not a Unicode application.
I have uploaded plain text files encoded in UTF-8 via standard FTP to my webserver. When I retrieved them again, I discovered that the local copies were messed up where there should be non-Unicode characters. Instead of the actual characters, there are a lot of seemingly random (but also Unicode) characters.
I figured that this has to do with Text/Binary upload modes, and that maybe my uploaded files were definitely messed up as I uploaded them in the default Text mode for .txt files, when I should have chosen Binary for the Unicode files. However, I have since figured out through testing that it does not matter if the files are uploaded in text or binary mode, but how they are downloaded. If I download them again in Text mode, they are messed up. If I download them again in Binary mode, the files are fine.
Is there a reasonable explanation behind this behaviour?