Mojibake Fixer and UTF-8 Converter
Repair garbled text such as é and ’ back to é and ’, or convert a text file from Windows-1252, Latin-1, Shift_JIS, GBK or another encoding to UTF-8.
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Input
Fix mojibake and convert text files to UTF-8
Output
Repaired
0 characters
é appears when UTF-8 bytes are decoded as Windows-1252 or Latin-1: é is c3 a9 in UTF-8, and c3 a9 in Latin-1 reads é. Reversing that decoding gives the original back, and running it twice fixes text that went through the mistake twice. The cause is usually a database connection or an HTTP header without charset=utf8mb4 / UTF-8.
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About this tool
Method, assumptions, practical next steps, and limits.
How é becomes é
é is the bytes c3 a9 in UTF-8. Read as Windows-1252 or Latin-1, c3 is à and a9 is ©. The cause is almost always a missing charset somewhere: a database connection not set to utf8mb4, an HTTP response without charset=utf-8, or a CSV opened with the wrong encoding. The WHATWG Encoding standard defines the legacy encodings browsers support.
Fix the source too
Repairing text is a stopgap. Set the connection charset, declare UTF-8 in headers and meta tags, and store text as UTF-8 everywhere so it does not happen again.