# Mojibake Repair (Encoding Detective)

Fix garbled text (mojibake) caused by wrong-encoding decoding — reverse UTF-8/Latin-1, Windows-1252, GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5, and MacRoman chains. Auto mode tries all and picks the cleanest result.

> Canonical page: https://elysiatools.com/en/tools/mojibake-repair

- **Category:** Text Processing

- **Keywords:** mojibake, garbled text, encoding fix, utf-8 latin1, charset repair, é, broken encoding

## Overview

Mojibake is the garbled text you see when bytes were encoded in one character encoding but decoded as another (e.g. UTF-8 bytes shown as Latin-1, producing é instead of é). This tool reverses the wrong decode: it re-encodes the garbled string using the suspected wrong decoder, then re-decodes those bytes with the correct encoding. Auto mode tries every common chain (Latin-1, Windows-1252, GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5, MacRoman) and scores each candidate by how much clean printable text it yields, so you can paste mystery garble and let the detective find the original. Great for fixing broken CSV exports, mislabeled web pages, database import artifacts, and copy-paste between locales.

## Inputs

- **Garbled text** (textarea): Paste garbled text, e.g. café or 中文
- **Repair chain** (select)

## When to use

- Repair garbled text from broken CSV exports, web pages, or database imports.
- Restore text damaged by UTF-8, Latin-1, Windows-1252, GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5, or MacRoman mismatches.
- Identify the likely encoding chain when you are unsure how the text became corrupted.

## How it works

- Paste the garbled text into the required text field.
- Select Auto mode or choose a specific repair chain.
- The tool reverses the suspected wrong decoding and reconstructs the original text.
- Auto mode compares supported candidates and returns the cleanest printable result as HTML.

## Use cases

- Fix mojibake in exported CSV text before using it in another application.
- Restore names, punctuation, and multilingual text affected by database import encoding errors.
- Repair copied text from web pages or documents displayed with the wrong character set.

## Frequently asked questions

### What is mojibake?

Mojibake is garbled text created when bytes encoded in one character set are decoded using another.

### Can I repair "café"?

Yes. Auto mode can reverse the UTF-8-as-Latin-1 error and recover "café".

### Which encoding chains are supported?

Supported chains include UTF-8 with Latin-1, Windows-1252, GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5, or MacRoman, plus GBK misread as UTF-8.

### What does Auto mode do?

It tries the supported repair chains and selects the candidate with the cleanest printable text.

### What input does the tool require?

Enter the garbled text in the text field. The repair chain is optional and defaults to Auto.

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## Samples

- [Hex/Unicode Encoding Format Samples](https://elysiatools.com/en/samples/text-hex-unicode-formats): Examples of hex (\xXX) and unicode (\uXXXX) escape sequence encoding formats
- [Copyright-Free MP3 Audio Samples](https://elysiatools.com/en/samples/mp3-samples): Collection of royalty-free audio samples for testing and development purposes including nature sounds, meditation music, and ambient audio
- [Web Image Processing Python Samples](https://elysiatools.com/en/samples/web-image-processing-python): Web Python image processing examples using PIL/Pillow including reading, saving, resizing, and format conversion
- [Android Image Processing Java Samples](https://elysiatools.com/en/samples/android-image-processing-java): Android Java image processing examples including reading/saving images, scaling, and format conversion