Mojibake (Garbled Text) Fixer

Free

Recovers the original bytes behind garbled (mojibake) text and re-decodes them under several common encodings, showing every candidate that comes out clean.

Garbled text

About this tool

Mojibake happens when text encoded in one character set (usually UTF-8) is mistakenly decoded with another (usually Windows-1252 or Latin-1), producing garbled characters.
This tool reverses that misread and tries re-decoding the recovered bytes with several common encodings, showing every candidate that produces clean text.

Recent Activity

Visible to everyone. Last 20 uses across all visitors, newest first.

Fixed 5 characters of garbled text (utf-8)

4 hours ago

Fixed 17 characters of garbled text (utf-8)

4 hours ago

Fixed 5 characters of garbled text (utf-8)

4 hours ago

Comments (0)

Found this tool useful? Leave a comment, share a tip, or tell us how we can make it better.

No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!

What this tool does

Paste text that looks garbled (for example CafÃ© instead of Café) and this tool recovers the original bytes and tries re-decoding them under several common character encodings, showing every result that comes out clean so you can pick the correct one.

How It Works

Mojibake like this is almost always caused by valid UTF-8 bytes being misread one byte at a time as Windows-1252 (or the closely related Latin-1). This tool reverses that first step, mapping each character in your garbled text back to the single byte Windows-1252 would have produced it from. It then feeds that recovered byte sequence into the browser's built-in TextDecoder for several candidate encodings (UTF-8, Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, GBK, Big5, EUC-KR, KOI8-R, ISO-8859-7), and keeps only the decodings that complete without errors or replacement characters.

Problems it solves

Recovering readable text from a file, email, or database export that was opened with the wrong encoding.
Fixing names, addresses, or other text fields that got corrupted during an import between systems with mismatched encoding settings.
Checking which original language or encoding a piece of garbled text most likely came from.

Frequently asked questions

›What causes mojibake in the first place?

It happens when text saved in one character encoding (almost always UTF-8 today) gets opened or imported by a program that assumes a different encoding (commonly Windows-1252 or Latin-1). Each original multi-byte UTF-8 character then gets displayed as two or three separate, wrong single-byte characters.

›Why does this tool show multiple results instead of one fix?

The same garbled bytes can sometimes be validly re-decoded under more than one encoding, and this tool has no way to know which one matches your actual source language. It shows every candidate that decodes cleanly (no replacement characters) so you can pick the one that reads correctly.

›My text shows no candidates at all, what does that mean?

Either the text was not actually mojibake caused by a Windows-1252/Latin-1 misread, or the original encoding was something outside the list this tool tries. Double-check that the text really looks garbled rather than just containing unusual but valid characters.

›Can this fix mojibake caused by other broken encodings, not just Windows-1252?

This tool specifically reverses a Windows-1252 or Latin-1 misread, since that is by far the most common real-world cause of mojibake. If your text was mangled by a different first-stage encoding, the byte recovery step itself won't produce the right bytes, and no candidate will look clean.

›Is this the same as a URL or Base64 decoder?

No. URL and Base64 encoding are separate, intentional, reversible text transformations. Mojibake is an unintentional side effect of a character-encoding mismatch, and fixing it means re-interpreting the same underlying bytes correctly rather than decoding a deliberate encoding scheme.

An advanced line counter that instantly analyzes your pasted text: duplicate/empty line detection, comment line filtering, regex-powered find & replace, sorting, and prefix/suffix insertion.