Text (uni)coding issue

[andrew at midwestcoastmedia.com]

I have a database on a LiveCode server that I use to track user  
interactions in a LiveCode app. It has gotten too big to query in  
LiveCode without timeout errors (the JSON gets mangled because there  
are now several thousand records), so I'm trying to generate a text  
file on the server and download that instead.

I can get the text file to generate on the server, but when I try to  
download it to my LiveCode app (to eventually save on the end-users  
computer) the text is in some weird format. I assumed this was some  
wierd unicode issue and tried to textDecode it, but can't seem to  
figure out what format it actually is so that just gives me text in a  
different weird format ("UTF-8", "UTF-16", and "MacRoman" don't seem  
to work).

My code on the LiveCode Server seems straight forward:
   put "SELECT * FROM promosRedeemed" into tSql
   put revDataFromQuery(TAB, "|", sDbId, tSql) into tRedemptions
   set linedelimiter to "|"
   set itemdelimiter to tab
   replace RETURN with " -=- " in tRedemptions // ACCOUNTS FOR LINE  
BREAKS IN DATA
   replace "|" with RETURN in tRedemptions
   put "redemption-log_" & the seconds & ".txt" into tFileName
   open file specialFolderPath("home") &  
"/public_html/server/apps/iot/logs/" & tFileName for write
   write tRedemptions to file specialFolderPath("home") &  
"/public_html/server/apps/iot/logs/" & tFileName
   close file specialFolderPath("home") &  
"/public_html/server/apps/iot/logs/" & tFileName


The first line of the text file when viewed in a web browser or text  
file downloaded directly (outside of LC) is plain text and looks as  
expected:
294	Wednesday, July 13, 2016 8:36	15	3	MacOS 10.11.5 -=-  
MacBookPro11,3 -=- 0,0,1920,1200 -=- 	39.892219,-85.974632

But when I fetch that URL in LiveCode using...
  put url (tURLtoDownload) into tFullRedemptionList
  put tFullRedemptionList into url ("binfile:Full-IOT_TSM_RedemptionList.xls")

...the first line (and all other lines basically) looks like this:
ã      ‰Ω◊rÎ:∂(˙Ï˝<un›ó≥<7rp≠ªÎ:Áú˝‚bîsí
ø˛ $@BH[≤<Â∂ª´´zyA
¿»
L∞ˇF¸ø!
ÿD¡÷˙ïx‚¸Óψ&˝G˛¡‡
∏dXíÇIAˇц†Í?ˇ’Ø°¸o  
õÄrNÄâ¸ÔhMıôı0fi‹˝Ç?˛!≈ø¬
Áˇê+è7Å˛e ≈ïSPˇ®ˇ‘˝êx~(ß Pø5?Ñ–ˇKÍ˝%eSô_ˇŸƒnÿQ?Œ—bSHòˇπ˜áN·w6)¸?TiÛ•ˇá≤¢NÕ!–g(Ù
Ä˙
‘
®[	ùïàÎïuá»YäÅ^ZCbà›ïX؃5+IπR*ä”Î≤f%uW


I know I've done similar tasks before (pretty sure this is code I  
borrowed from other projects I've done) but can't figure out why this  
text is so garbled. Tried in 9.0.0dp7 and 8.1.6 with the same result.  
Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

--Andrew Bell