Mojibake Fixer / Charset Transcoder
Re-decode garbled text from a legacy charset into clean UTF-8 — fix 'café' back to 'café'. Runs entirely in your browser, no server, no sign-up.
What this tool does
When text that was encoded in one charset gets read as if it were another, you
get mojibake — garbled sequences like café (should be café) or “
(should be a curly quote “). This tool re-decodes that text: it reinterprets
the input's bytes under the legacy charset you choose and emits clean UTF-8.
Everything runs locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded, it works offline once loaded, and there's no sign-up.
How to use it
- Paste the garbled text into Garbled text.
- Leave Source charset on
autoto let the tool try the common charsets and keep the cleanest result — or set it explicitly to the encoding the text was wrongly decoded as. The most common culprit iswindows-1252. - Choose how to handle bytes that don't fit the charset under On undecodable bytes.
- If the text was mangled more than once (double mojibake), raise Repair passes to peel off each layer.
Auto-detect
Set Source charset to auto (the default) and the tool re-decodes the text
under each common legacy charset, scoring each result, and returns the cleanest
one — the one with the fewest replacement characters and stray control codes. If
nothing looks like a clean repair (for example, the text wasn't actually
mojibake), it tells you so; pick a charset explicitly to force a specific
re-decode.
Source charset — what to pick
The charset field accepts standard (WHATWG) labels, case-insensitive, with the usual aliases:
| You might see… | Try this charset |
|---|---|
é, è, ü, “, ’ | windows-1252 |
| Western-European accents off by one | iso-8859-1 (alias latin1) |
| Euro sign issues | iso-8859-15 |
| Garbled Cyrillic | windows-1251 or koi8-r |
| Garbled Japanese | shift_jis (alias sjis) or euc-jp |
| Garbled Korean | euc-kr |
| Garbled Simplified / Traditional Chinese | gbk / big5 |
On undecodable bytes
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| replace (default) | Substitutes the Unicode replacement character � (U+FFFD) for any byte sequence that isn't valid in the chosen charset, and keeps going. |
| strict | Stops and reports an error on the first undecodable byte, so you know the charset is wrong. |
Examples
| Garbled input | Source charset | Clean output |
|---|---|---|
café | auto | café |
“hi†| windows-1252 | “hi” |
naïve résumé | windows-1252 | naïve résumé |
FAQ
What is mojibake?
It's garbled text that appears when bytes encoded in one character set are decoded with a different one. The fix is to decode with the correct charset — which is exactly what this tool does.
Which charset should I choose?
Start with windows-1252 for European text —
it's behind the vast majority of Ã-prefixed mojibake. If the result still looks
wrong, try iso-8859-1, and for non-Latin scripts pick the matching regional
encoding from the table above.
Is it free and private?
Yes — your text never leaves your device, and the tool keeps working offline once the page has loaded.
Why didn't anything change?
If your text was already clean UTF-8 (or pure ASCII), re-decoding it as a single-byte charset won't help — this tool only fixes text that was genuinely mis-decoded.
Developer & Automation Access
Run it from the terminal
Same engine as this page, headless — via the gizza CLI:
gizza tool charset-transcode "café naïve résumé"New to the CLI? Get gizza →
Open it by URL
Pre-fill and auto-run this tool with query parameters — the names match the API/CLI:
https://gizza.ai/tools/charset-transcode/?text=caf%C3%83%C2%A9%20%20na%C3%83%C2%AFve%20r%C3%83%C2%A9sum%C3%83%C2%A9&from=auto&errors=replace&passes=1Machine-readable descriptor: tool.json — title + parameters JSON Schema for agents.