Mojibake Fixer
Repair garbled text where UTF-8 was misread as Windows-1252 — turn “café” back into “café” and “’” back into “’”. Runs entirely in your browser.
Prefer the terminal? See the CLI equivalent →About the Mojibake Fixer
- Repairs mojibake / garbled text
- Lenient per-run repair
- Recognized by smart paste
- Instant results
- 100% private — runs in your browser
- Free, no sign-up
Mojibake is text that has been decoded with the wrong character set — most often UTF-8 bytes read as Windows-1252, which turns “café” into “café”, “’” into “’”, and “€” into “€”. This tool reverses that mistake and gives you the original text back.
It works by re-encoding each character to its Windows-1252 byte and decoding those bytes as UTF-8 — the exact inverse of how the text got garbled. Crucially, if the text is already valid (or the reinterpretation would not produce valid UTF-8), it is left untouched, so correctly-encoded text is never damaged. Double-encoded text is repaired by applying the fix more than once.
Everything runs in your browser; the text you paste never leaves your device.
How to use it
- Paste the garbled text into the box.
- Read the repaired text below — a note tells you whether anything was changed.
- Copy the result. If it still looks off, the input may be garbled a different way (not UTF-8-as-Windows-1252).
Common mojibake patterns
- é / è / ü
- Accented letters (é, è, ü) — UTF-8 read as Windows-1252.
- ’ / “ â€
- Curly apostrophe and smart quotes.
- â€"
- En/em dashes.
- €
- The euro sign €.
- é
- Double-encoded — the same text mangled twice.
Frequently asked questions
What is mojibake?+
It’s the garbled text you get when bytes are decoded with the wrong character encoding — classically UTF-8 data interpreted as Windows-1252 or Latin-1. The tell-tale signs are sequences like “é”, “’”, and “€”.
Will it damage text that is already correct?+
No. The repair is only applied when reinterpreting the text yields valid UTF-8; otherwise the input is returned unchanged. Correctly-encoded accented text (café, naïve, 日本語) is left exactly as-is.
It didn’t fix my text — why?+
This tool targets the most common case (UTF-8 misread as Windows-1252/Latin-1). Text garbled a different way — a different source encoding, or bytes already lost during a lossy conversion — can’t always be recovered.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?+
No. The repair runs entirely in your browser with client-side JavaScript; your text never leaves your device.
Works well with
Mojibake Fixer chains with these tools — send your result straight on:
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