weird output file

I've been using html2text for a long time, mostly in monitoring several websites (as part of a shell script) manipulating the text following a command like html2text -o "file.txt" "file.html" to check for a certain change in the text content.

However, this command has recently begun resulting in a weird output file containing odd characters etc. although, for instance, a command like lynx -dump "file.html" > "file.txt" has more or less the usual output.

On the other hand, I get a perfect terminal output when I simply enter a command like html2text "file.html" that doesn't send the output to a file.

I've also discovered that python3-html2text works as html2text used to until recently.