Reading in log file

Question

Hi there,
I'm not too experienced with VB .net. I'm trying to read in a log file for parsing. The problem is the log file has special characters, and I'm having trouble reading it into my app. When I dump the data into a String, I notice that the String only contains some character that looks like a square. The length of the String, however, seems to be the correct length. Anyone have any information on this? 

Thanks in advance!