Garbled Text Fixer

Repair common text-encoding mistakes, also called mojibake. Paste text, review automatically selected repairs and keep your original intact.

Analysis selects all suggestions automatically. Review them and deselect any you do not want.

Original text

Paste or type text with broken accents or symbols.

Output — selected repairs only

After analysis, selected suggestions appear here. Deselect any you do not want.

Advanced settings

Byte interpretation

Maximum rounds

Windows-1252 is the default. ISO-8859-1 means literal bytes, not the browser label alias. Changing settings clears selections.

Paste text to begin.

Limit: 500,000 UTF-16 code units. Pasted text only; no file conversion.

Text repair runs in your browser. This tool does not save or upload drafts; shared site services may still make network requests.

How to fix garbled text

Paste or type the text in Original text.
Choose the byte interpretation and up to three rounds if needed.
Review the automatically selected suggestions, deselect any unintended changes, then copy the output.

Understanding encoding repairs

Mojibake happens when UTF-8 bytes are read as another encoding and then copied as Unicode. This tool reverses Windows-1252 or literal ISO-8859-1 interpretations where the bytes form a valid UTF-8 character. It does not automatically identify the original encoding.

Mixed clean and broken text is common. Only local byte-reversible spans become candidates; clean text, emoji and unrelated scripts remain in place. Even plausible clean text can be byte-reversible, so review and deselect unwanted suggestions.

Use two or three rounds only for repeated corruption. Intermediates and actual rounds are shown. Replacement characters (�), deleted bytes and missing glyphs may represent permanent loss. Other historical encodings, file uploads, CSV repair and AI rewriting are outside this tool.

Examples

Broken accent: cafÃ© → café automatically when analysis completes. A clean café has no candidate in this example.

Repeated corruption: cafÃƒÂ© → cafÃ© in one round → café in two rounds. Paste a CSV excerpt as text; this does not repair the whole file.

Privacy and limits

Text repair runs in your browser. Drafts are not saved or uploaded by this tool; shared site services may still make network requests.

The limit is 500,000 UTF-16 code units. Larger text stays in the editor without analysis. This tool does not remove invisible characters, normalize Unicode or unescape HTML.

Questions and answers

No. A valid byte reversal is only a possibility. Lost or replaced bytes cannot be reconstructed reliably.

Windows-1252 uses its specified C1 character map. Literal ISO-8859-1 maps U+0000–U+00FF directly to byte values. Browser latin1 labels resolve to Windows-1252, so this tool implements ISO literally.

No. Paste text from the file. For spacing in copied PDF text, use PDF Text Cleaner. Fancy Text Converter handles decorative Unicode, and Text Size Calculator compares byte sizes.