Mojibake Fixer
Fix garbled mojibake by re-decoding between UTF-8, Latin-1, Windows-1252, Shift-JIS, and TIS-620. Auto-detect the likely encoding pair.
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What is Mojibake Fixer?
The Mojibake Fixer is a free online tool that repairs garbled text caused by the wrong character encoding. It maps pasted characters back to bytes (Latin-1, Windows-1252, UTF-8, or TIS-620) and re-decodes them as UTF-8, Shift-JIS, TIS-620, or another encoding, with an auto-detect ranking of likely pairs. Everything runs in your browser.
Key Benefits
- Recover readable UTF-8, Thai, or Japanese from pasted mojibake.
- See ranked encoding-pair candidates instead of guessing blindly.
- Peel double-encoded text by feeding the result back in.
- Works offline with no uploads or third-party charset APIs.
Common Use Cases
- •Fixing CSV or log files that show é instead of accented letters.
- •Restoring Thai text that was saved as TIS-620 but opened as Latin-1.
- •Repairing Japanese Shift-JIS titles copied from older Windows tools.
- •Cleaning email or web-scrape text that mixed UTF-8 and Windows-1252.
How to Use the Mojibake Fixer
- Paste the garbled text: Paste the broken characters into the input box, or click a sample (Café, Thai, Japanese) to see a repair immediately.
- Review the auto-detect result: The tool ranks likely encoding pairs such as Windows-1252 → UTF-8. If several look plausible, click another candidate.
- Switch to Manual if needed: Choose what the text was misread as and what it should be decoded as (UTF-8, Latin-1, Windows-1252, Shift-JIS, or TIS-620).
- Copy or peel another layer: Copy or download the repaired text. If it is still garbled (double-encoded), click Use as input and run the repair again.
Key Features
- Auto-detects the likely encoding pair for pasted garbled text
- Repairs UTF-8 misread as Latin-1 or Windows-1252 (the classic é case)
- Decodes Shift-JIS Japanese and TIS-620 Thai mojibake
- Manual mode to pick “misread as” and “decode as” encodings yourself
- Use-as-input to peel double-encoded text layer by layer
- Runs entirely in-browser with copy and download — nothing is uploaded
Frequently Asked Questions
What is mojibake?
Mojibake is garbled text that appears when bytes are decoded with the wrong character encoding. A common case is UTF-8 bytes shown as Latin-1 or Windows-1252, which turns café into Café. The fixer maps those characters back to bytes and decodes them with the intended encoding.
Which encodings can this tool repair?
It re-decodes between UTF-8, Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1), Windows-1252, Shift-JIS, and TIS-620 (Thai). Auto-detect tries the usual misread encodings first (Windows-1252 and Latin-1) because that is how most pasted mojibake arrives.
Why did auto-detect pick the wrong result?
Short snippets can score more than one plausible script. Click another candidate, or switch to Manual and set Misread as plus Decode as yourself. For double-encoded text, apply Use as input and run the repair a second time.
Does any of my text leave the browser?
No. Encoding conversion uses the built-in TextDecoder API in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and the tool works offline after the page has loaded.