Text encoding converter
Letters turned into “Ïðèâåò” or “Привет”? Drop the file, check the preview and save it as UTF-8.
Mojibake like “Ïðèâåò”? Save it as UTF-8.
Encodings it reads
- UTF-8
- Unicode. The web standard, every language
- UTF-16 LE
- Unicode, 2 bytes per character, little-endian (Windows)
- UTF-16 BE
- Unicode, 2 bytes per character, big-endian
- Windows-1252
- Western European on Windows
- Windows-1251
- Cyrillic on Windows
- Windows-1250
- Central European on Windows
- ISO-8859-1
- Latin-1, Western European (read as Windows-1252)
- ISO-8859-5
- Cyrillic, ISO standard
- KOI8-R
- Russian, older Unix systems and email
- Shift-JIS
- Japanese
- GBK
- Simplified Chinese
- Big5
- Traditional Chinese
What it does
Guesses the encoding
It checks for a byte-order mark and valid UTF-8 first, then picks the encoding whose text reads most like words. The preview shows you before you save.
Stays on your device
The file is read and rewritten in your browser. It is never uploaded, so there is no size limit and nothing to delete.
12 encodings in, Unicode out
Cyrillic, Western and Central European, Japanese and Chinese text. Saved as UTF-8, UTF-8 with BOM, UTF-16 LE or UTF-16 BE.
How it works
Add the file
Drop a text file on the orange block or choose it on your device.
Check the guess
The encoding it detected is already selected. If the preview still looks wrong, pick another one.
Pick the target
UTF-8 suits almost everything. Choose UTF-8 with BOM for older Excel, or UTF-16 if a program asks for it.
Save it
Download the new file. The new encoding is added to its name, so your original stays as it was.
Questions
What is a text encoding?
It is the table that turns the bytes in a file into letters. The same bytes read with the wrong table give the wrong letters.
How does it guess the encoding?
A byte-order mark or valid UTF-8 settles it. Otherwise it decodes the start of the file with each encoding and picks the one that gives the most real letters and no broken characters. It is a guess, so check the preview.
Why do I see garbled characters?
The file was saved in one encoding and opened as another, for example Windows-1251 text opened as Windows-1252. Pick the encoding the file was saved in and the letters come back.
Which encoding should I save in?
UTF-8. It covers every language and is what the web and most programs expect. Some older versions of Excel only open a CSV correctly when it is UTF-8 with BOM.