Cruel and unusual punishment is a phrase in common law describing punishment that is considered unacceptable due to the suffering, pain, or humiliation it inflicts on the person subjected to the sanction. The precise definition varies by jurisdiction, but typically includes punishments that are arbitrary, unnecessary, or overly severe compared to the crime.
One way unusual characters can be introduced is by copy and paste from another document e.g. a PDF.
Rather than using a command line tool that may not be available in Windows (and may corrupt any non-text file content e.g. embedded images), you can easily search for non-ASCII characters...