How to fix and recover a "corrupt history file" in zsh?

Found a blog post describing a fix that appears to work for me, while restoring my missing history:

mv .zsh_history .zsh_history_bad
strings .zsh_history_bad > .zsh_history

Afterwards, you may want to instruct zsh to re-read the history form the recovered history file

fc -R .zsh_history

Simply removing random characters may also work:

• vim .zsh_history

• Remove any strange characters, which would most probably be near the end. (In my case I had a string of @ in the second last line, following a forced shutdown)

• :x (save and exit)