Character Encoding Fixer
Paste text with garbled characters such as “é” or “ÅŸ” to turn them back into “é” and “ş”. Or open a file whose letters look wrong and choose the encoding it was saved in.
INPUT
OUTPUT
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to a server.
How to fix garbled characters
Paste the garbled text
Paste text from an email, a CSV export or a web page where accented letters look like Ã, Â or Å followed by another symbol.
Let it detect the cause
Auto tries both common causes and keeps the better result. You can also choose Western or Turkish yourself.
Copy the repaired text
The result shows how many characters were repaired. Copy it, download it or use it as the new input.
Where garbled text comes from
UTF-8 stores letters such as é, ş or € in two or three bytes. When a program reads those bytes with an older single-byte encoding like Windows-1252, each byte becomes its own character, and “é” turns into “é”. The fixer reverses exactly that, and only where the characters really form such a sequence.
Decoding a file
If a file shows question marks or wrong letters, it may have been saved in an older encoding. Open it with Decode a file and pick the encoding, for example Windows-1254 for Turkish or Windows-1251 for Cyrillic. The text is converted to UTF-8 and can be downloaded.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Western and Turkish?
The Western and Turkish encodings differ mainly in six letters: Ğ, İ, Ş, ğ, ı and ş replace Ð, Ý, Þ, ð, ý and þ. Text garbled with the Turkish encoding shows ğŸ for emoji and Ğ for Cyrillic, so Auto picks it when that fixes more.
Why are some question marks or � left?
When text was saved with a wrong encoding, characters that didn't exist in it were replaced and are lost. They can't be recovered from the text; use the original file if you still have it.
Is my text uploaded?
No. Repairing and decoding happen in your browser.