If you have issues with extracting strings with special chars via cypher-shell you need to verify your locale or regional settings for the output of the stream is UTF-8 or super-set of UTF-8.

Running an export of a Neo4j Instance content via stream (redirected to file) would be subject to the local setting default encoding when written to file:

call apoc.export.cypher.all(null,{format:'cypher-shell', useOptimizations: {type: 'unwind_batch', unwindBatchSize: 500}, batchSize:500})

Returns a cypher stream (can be redirected to file) but in the property values where there are some special characters like "'" (single quote) or "-" (hyphen) etc... these will be substituted by "?" 

Example : This node text "Bob's bike" would become "Bob?s bike" in the exported file.  

 

Resolution:

To correct this, ensure that the output of the stream remains in UTF-8 encoding by altering the default local settings.

Linux/MAC:

export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

Then check the output with the command locale

Windows (from Powershell) 

PS C:\> Set-WinSystemLocale -SystemLocale <<code>>

and set the redirection to default to UTF-8

$PSDefaultParameterValues['Out-File:Encoding'] = 'utf8'

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/international/get-winsystemlocale?view=win10-ps ,

 

Note: In case of large volumes, you may also want to adjust the heap for the cypher-shell via setting JAVA_OPTS (see https://neo4j.com/labs/apoc/4.1/export/cypher/ )