Mojibake Detector & Fixer

Mojibake(文字化け - literally "character transformation" in Japanese) is the garbled text that appears when a string is decoded using the wrong character encoding. It happens when a system or application interprets the bytes of text using a different encoding than the one that was used to create them. For example, the UTF-8 bytes for the French word "déjà vu" (64 C3 A9 6A C3 A0 20 76 75) would appear as "déjà vu" if read using Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) encoding. Our mojibake detector identifies these patterns by looking for known byte sequences that result from common encoding mismatches, then our mojibake fixer reverses the corruption by re-interpreting the bytes with the correct encoding.

1. 1. Paste corrupted text: Copy the garbled text and paste it into the left panel, or click one of the sample buttons to try common mojibake examples (French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Smart Quotes).
2. 2. Click "Analyze Encoding": Our mojibake detector scans the text for known corruption patterns and reports what encoding was likely used to decode the text, what encoding should have been used, and how many corrupted characters were found.
3. 3. Click "Fix Mojibake": Our mojibake fixer automatically re-interprets the bytes using the correct encoding, restoring the original text. You can then copy or download the fixed result.

• UTF-8 → Latin-1 / Windows-1252: The most common scenario. Accented characters like é, ü, ñ become the two-character sequences é, ü, ñ. Cyrillic text becomes unreadable sequences starting with Ð. CJK characters become sequences starting with ä, æ, etc.
• UTF-8 → Windows-1252 (Smart Quotes): UTF-8 encoded curly quotes, em-dashes, and bullets display as ’, “, —, etc. Common in content copied from word processors or web pages.
• Double UTF-8 Encoding: When UTF-8 text is accidentally UTF-8 encoded a second time. The bytes for é (0xC3 0xA9) get re-encoded as the 4-byte sequence 0xC3 0x83 0xC2 0xA9, displaying as é.
• UTF-8 BOM Issues: The UTF-8 Byte Order Mark (0xEF BB BF) displayed as the visible characters "" at the start of a file when it is read using the wrong encoding.

While our mojibake detector handles the most common encoding mismatch scenarios, there are limitations to be aware of. The detector uses pattern matching against known mojibake signatures, which means it may not recognize every possible encoding corruption - especially with rare encoding pairs (like UTF-8 decoded as Shift-JIS or KOI8-R). Short texts (under 10 characters) may not have enough corrupted content for reliable detection. The confidence score reflects how many known patterns were matched; a low-confidence result may still contain mojibake that wasn't recognized. For best results, try the "Fix Mojibake" action even if the detector shows no issues - the fixer applies a more aggressive repair strategy that can correct patterns the detector might miss. All text processing in this mojibake detector and fixer is performed entirely in your browser - no data is uploaded to any server, and no text leaves your device.