apostrophe turning into \x92

Question

mycorpus.txt

Human where\'s machine interface for lab abc computer applications   
A where\'s survey of user opinion of computer system response         


        

Answer 1

Code point 92(hex) in window-1252 encoding is Unicode code point 2019(hex) which is 'RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK'. This looks very like an apostrophe and is likely to be the actual character that you have in stopwords.txt, which I've guessed from the way python has interpreted in, has be encoded in windows-1252 or an encoding that shares ASCII and ’ codepoint values.

' vs ’