diff --git a/private_gpt/components/ingest/ingest_helper.py b/private_gpt/components/ingest/ingest_helper.py
index da62568b..c11a0a19 100644
--- a/private_gpt/components/ingest/ingest_helper.py
+++ b/private_gpt/components/ingest/ingest_helper.py
@@ -77,6 +77,7 @@ class IngestionHelper:
         IngestionHelper._exclude_metadata(documents)
         return documents
 
+    #Modification to provide better support for file ingest with charmap issues
     @staticmethod
     def _load_file_to_documents(file_name: str, file_data: Path) -> list[Document]:
         logger.debug("Transforming file_name=%s into documents", file_name)
@@ -89,17 +90,61 @@ class IngestionHelper:
             )
             # Read as a plain text
             string_reader = StringIterableReader()
-            return string_reader.load_data([file_data.read_text()])
-
+            return string_reader.load_data([IngestionHelper._read_all_text(file_data)])
+    
         logger.debug("Specific reader found for extension=%s", extension)
         documents = reader_cls().load_data(file_data)
-
-        # Sanitize NUL bytes in text which can't be stored in Postgres
-        for i in range(len(documents)):
-            documents[i].text = documents[i].text.replace("\u0000", "")
-
+        
         return documents
 
+    #new method being called from _load_file_to_documents
+    @staticmethod
+    def _read_all_text(file_data: Path) -> str:
+        try:
+            # Read raw bytes first
+            raw_bytes = file_data.read_bytes()
+            
+            # Use chardet to detect encoding
+            detected = chardet.detect(raw_bytes)
+            encoding = detected["encoding"] or 'utf-8'  # Fallback to utf-8 if detection fails
+            confidence = detected.get('confidence', 0)
+            
+            logger.debug(f"Detected encoding {encoding} with confidence {confidence} for {file_data}")
+            
+            # Try the detected encoding first
+            try:
+                text = raw_bytes.decode(encoding)
+            except UnicodeDecodeError:
+                # If detected encoding fails, try common encodings
+                for fallback_encoding in ['utf-8', 'cp1252', 'iso-8859-1', 'latin1']:
+                    try:
+                        text = raw_bytes.decode(fallback_encoding)
+                        logger.debug(f"Successfully decoded with fallback encoding: {fallback_encoding}")
+                        break
+                    except UnicodeDecodeError:
+                        continue
+                else:
+                    # If all encodings fail, use 'replace' error handler with utf-8
+                    text = raw_bytes.decode('utf-8', errors='replace')
+                    logger.warning(f"Falling back to UTF-8 with replacement for {file_data}")
+            
+            # Clean up the text
+            cleaned_text = (text.encode('utf-8', errors='replace')
+                        .decode('utf-8')
+                        .replace('\udc58', '')  # Remove specific problematic Unicode chars
+                        .replace('\x00', '')     # Remove null bytes
+                        .replace('\ufffd', '')   # Remove replacement character
+                        .strip())                # Remove leading/trailing whitespace
+            
+            if not cleaned_text:
+                logger.warning(f"Cleaned text is empty for {file_data}")
+                
+            return cleaned_text
+            
+        except Exception as e:
+            logger.error(f"Error processing file {file_data}: {str(e)}")
+            raise
+
     @staticmethod
     def _exclude_metadata(documents: list[Document]) -> None:
         logger.debug("Excluding metadata from count=%s documents", len(documents))