ANALYSIS ENCODING DIAGNOSTIC

Encoding Detector / Repair

Upload a text file that looks wrong — question marks, boxes, "é"-style mojibake, or garbled symbols. Full UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 support, iterative mojibake fixing, and a one-click convert-to-UTF-8 for anything it can decode.

File

Common error messages this diagnoses

If you're here because something threw one of these, this tool shows you exactly what's wrong and how much is recoverable:

  • "invalid byte sequence in UTF-8" — a common runtime/database error when a file isn't the encoding it claims to be.
  • "UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte" — (Python) — same root cause, Python's wording.
  • "text shows as "é" instead of "é"" — the classic mojibake symptom of UTF-8 bytes decoded as Latin-1/Windows-1252.

What this tool deliberately doesn't check

No full charset detection beyond UTF-8, Windows-1252, UTF-16, and UTF-32 — legacy multi-byte encodings (Shift-JIS, GBK, Big5, KOI8-R, and the other ISO-8859-* variants) aren't auto-detected or repaired. The mojibake fixer only handles the Latin-1-as-UTF-8 double-encoding pattern — by far the most common case, but not the only possible one. BOM-less UTF-16 detection is a heuristic based on null-byte patterns, not a certainty — always check the result. This tool checks the byte/character encoding only, not whether the text is well-formed JSON, XML, or any other structured format.