Encoding Errors Guide: Fixing Mojibake and Garbled Text
Mojibake (garbled text like é) occurs when text is decoded with the wrong charset. Diagnose encoding mismatches and fix them in files, databases, and APIs.
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Tags: encoding, unicode, debugging
Encoding Errors Guide: Fixing Mojibake and Garbled Text Mojibake is the Japanese word for "character transformation" — the garbled text you get when bytes are decoded with the wrong charset. If you've seen "é" instead of "é", "’" instead of "'" (smart apostrophe), or a database full of "�" characters, this guide explains exactly what went wrong and how to fix it. --- What Mojibake Actually Is Mojibake happens when bytes that were encoded in charset A are decoded as charset B. The bytes haven't changed — just the interpretation. Example: The word "café" in Latin-1 is the byte sequence: If those bytes are decoded as UTF-8, the decoder reaches and expects a continuation byte to follow (because , which is the start of a 3-byte UTF-8 sequence). Finding or end-of-string instead, it either…
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