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Text Encoding Fixer

Repair supported UTF-8 mojibake by explicitly reinterpreting Latin-1 or Windows-1252 characters.

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How this works

The tool runs in this browser. Your file or text is not uploaded to UseFreeTools. Check this tool's limits for anything it may save on your device.

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Showing an example. Edit to see your own.

Up to 100,000 characters. The text is reinterpreted as bytes, then decoded as UTF-8.

Choose the original single-byte mapping yourself. Browsers treat labels such as Latin-1 and ISO-8859-1 as Windows-1252; this Latin-1 option uses the true one-byte-to-one-code-point mapping.

Processed in your browser. Your inputs stay on this device.

How to use Text Encoding Fixer

  1. Paste the garbled text and keep a separate copy of the original.
  2. Choose the earlier character interpretation you want to reverse.
  3. Run the repair and compare accents, symbols and unchanged sections.
  4. Copy the repaired result only after checking it against the intended wording.

Example: Text Encoding Fixer

Reverse a Windows-1252 interpretation of UTF-8.

You add
Text: café and €. Source interpretation: Windows-1252.
You get
The strict reversal returns café and € without replacement characters.

Supported inputs and limits

Up to 100,000 characters. Select an explicit true ISO-8859-1 byte mapping or Windows-1252 mapping, followed by strict UTF-8 decoding. Unmappable characters, invalid UTF-8 and lost replacement characters cannot be repaired and are refused. The tool does not guess encodings or automatically repair mixed correctly decoded and garbled text. Keep the original and compare the returned wording.

Where your input is processed

This tool processes your input in this browser. Your text and files are not uploaded to UseFreeTools. Check this tool's limits for anything it may save on your device.

A reversal needs the earlier bytes

Mojibake often appears when UTF-8 bytes were read as a single-byte encoding. A supported repair maps those visible characters back to their earlier byte values, then decodes the bytes strictly as UTF-8. It cannot reconstruct information that was already discarded.

Questions about Text Encoding Fixer

Can it repair every garbled document?

No. It reverses a specific supported encoding mistake. Missing bytes, replacement characters and a mix of correctly decoded and garbled text may not be recoverable.

How do Latin-1 and Windows-1252 differ here?

Their mappings differ for several byte values, including punctuation and the euro sign. This tool treats the two modes explicitly rather than relying on the browser's Latin-1 label.

Why does the repair refuse my input?

A character cannot map back to a byte in the selected mode, or the reconstructed bytes are not valid UTF-8. The page refuses that conversion instead of silently inserting replacement characters.

Should I repair text that already looks right?

Keep correctly decoded text unchanged. Applying the wrong reversal can damage valid wording; use the comparison rather than treating repair as automatic cleanup.

Project manager: Tony Hines · Content updated 1 October 2026 · Report a problem

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