Wow, great work so far. This is really interesting. My guess is that they were moving content out of some proprietary early-2000s CMS around 2015. Instead of c

Wow, great work so far. This is really interesting. My guess is that they were moving content out of some proprietary early-2000s CMS around 2015. Instead of carefully parsing the storage format and extracting the text, they dumped it and the output was peppered with garbage. To sanitize the output, they simply elided certain character sequences. Further speculation, 'xb' and 'xe' (for 'beginning' and 'end') were control sequences marking the extent of something in the old CMS format Edit: These people would be the ones to ask: > The Software Engineering team at Condé Nast International (CNI) knew it needed an automated way to migrate the vast quantities of content, and it developed a tool to do just that, recognizing that no off-the-shelf tool could cope with the disparate set of content it was facing, spanning multiple territories, languages and content types. But to meet its hard three-month deadline of migrating the first territory, Germany, CNI also saw the need for additional resources who were experienced in key technologies, including Node.js and React, so it selected NearForm. https://www.nearform.com/blog/case-study/accelerating-transformation-at-a-global-media-company/ https://www.nearform.com/blog/case-study/accelerating-transf...