Mojibake Generator
Garble text into mojibake by reading it in the wrong character encoding (café → café). Runs in your browser.
What is mojibake?
Mojibake (Japanese 文字化け, “character transformation”) is the garbled text you get when bytes saved in one character encoding are read back in another. The most common culprit is UTF-8 text being interpreted as Windows-1252 (or Latin-1): an accented letter like é is stored as two bytes, and those two bytes get shown as two separate characters — café becomes café.
This generator recreates that effect on purpose. Type any text, choose the encoding it should be “mis-read” as, and copy the mojibake — handy for testing how software handles encoding bugs, for recreating a real garble you've seen, or just for fun.
Common examples
| Original (UTF-8) | Read as Windows-1252 |
|---|---|
| café | café |
| naïve résumé | naïve résumé |
| Größe | Größe |
| €20 | €20 |
Seeing mojibake and want it fixed instead? Use the Unbake Mojibake tool.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is mojibake?
- Mojibake (文字化け, Japanese for "character transformation") is garbled text that appears when bytes encoded in one character set are decoded using a different one. The classic example is UTF-8 text read as Windows-1252, which turns "café" into "café".
- How does this generator work?
- It encodes your text as UTF-8 bytes, then decodes those same bytes as if they were a legacy single-byte encoding (such as Windows-1252 or Latin-1). The mismatch produces authentic-looking mojibake.
- Can I turn the mojibake back into normal text?
- Yes — use the companion Unbake Mojibake tool. Because single-byte encodings map bytes and characters one-to-one, the process is fully reversible.
- Is my text uploaded anywhere?
- No. Everything runs locally in your browser using the built-in TextEncoder/TextDecoder APIs.