EzyTools

Broken Encoding Fixer (Mojibake)

Repair text mangled by the wrong encoding — مرحبا back to مرحبا, ü back to ü.

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Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded or stored on a server.

About this tool

When UTF-8 text is opened as Windows-1252 or Latin-1, Arabic turns into strings like مرحبا and Turkish letters become ü and ç. It happens constantly with CSV exports, old databases, emails and misconfigured servers. This tool reverses the damage by recovering the original bytes — and it repairs each broken sequence separately, so text that mixes garbled and correct parts is fixed instead of rejected.

How to use

  1. 1Paste the garbled text.
  2. 2Keep Repair selected — the fixed text appears in the output.
  3. 3If the text was broken twice, the tool repeats the repair automatically.
  4. 4Copy the repaired text.

When you need it

  • Opening a CSV export where Arabic names appear as symbols.
  • Recovering text from a database migrated with the wrong character set.
  • Reading email subjects or website content that display as gibberish.

Frequently asked questions

What causes mojibake?

Text is saved in one encoding, usually UTF-8, and read in another, usually Windows-1252. Every Arabic letter uses two bytes in UTF-8, and each byte is shown as a separate Latin character.

Why does it say my text does not look broken?

The text either has no mojibake sequences, or it was damaged in a way that lost information — for example, replaced with question marks. Those characters cannot be recovered by any tool.

How do I stop it from happening in Excel?

Import the CSV through Data → From Text/CSV and choose UTF-8 as the file origin, or save the file as UTF-8 with BOM so Excel detects it automatically.

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