Recently, I picked up a project that worked with a qualtrics survey - but for some reason a bunch of nonsense text was injected into the response, text from the template. This text was overwriting questions, and their answers when looking at the response, but was not visible in the configuration of the survey or when filling out the survey. I was told by support that fixing this wasn’t possible and so the only path forward was manually re-creating everything about the survey in a new survey.

It turns out that .qsf files are just JSON, and so I was able to export the .qsf of the survey using Tools → export survey, change the file name to .json, and then load it into visual studio code. from there, I was able to format the text of the file into a .json, and repair the survey’s underlying code. I found that there were nonsense entries in a map called languages that were overwriting the question text, and was able to delete the language dictionaries and replace them with language arrays like "Language": u],

After updating the file and removing all of the nonsense text, I could then import the file as a survey, and it carried over all of the workflow rules into a new survey with the nonsense text no longer present.