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It'll "work". A motivated and forgiving text editor will take the binary data and show it to you in the form of text, but this text will look like someone threw a hand grenade into a unicode cosplay convention.
Binary to text is possible in theory, but as everyone who has accidentally sent the output of a binary file to the terminal can tell you, it rarely works very well.
If you really want to "read" the file as text, it's best to run it through a base64 decoder, so that the output will be limited to characters that are actually readable. The resulting text can then be encoded again and sent to a new file, and you will have a reproducible text string that represents your original file.