I attempted to change the character encoding to UTF-16 and it changed all of my text in Eclipse's text editor to Chinese. A ctrl-z saved my work, but now the console is stuck in Chinese. 
When running an arbitrary python script, the script terminates immediately and gives the following message: "†䙩汥•䌺屄敶屗..." (The string goes on for much longer, but stackoverflow detects it as spam)
What does this mean? I've tried resetting things to default but to no avail.
Edit -> Set encoding UTF-16 screwed up my text again. another ctrl-z and Edit->set encoding ASCII fixed it.
unexpected Chinese output from eclipse console