Unbake Mojibake

Fix garbled, mojibake text

If your text is full of sequences like café, ’, ü or привет, you're looking at mojibake — text that was saved in one character encoding and read back in another. Paste it above and this tool reverses the mismatch to recover the original. With auto-detect on, it tries each likely encoding and shows the cleanest result first.

How recovery works

Most real-world mojibake is UTF-8 mistakenly displayed as a single-byte encoding such as Windows-1252. To undo it, the tool turns your garbled characters back into the bytes they represent in that encoding, then decodes those bytes correctly as UTF-8. Because single-byte encodings map bytes and characters one-to-one, the recovery is exact when the original mismatch was reversible.

Want to create mojibake instead (for testing)? Use the Mojibake Generator.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "unbake mojibake" mean?

Mojibake is garbled text caused by an encoding mismatch (for example UTF-8 read as Windows-1252, which makes "café" look like "café"). Unbaking reverses the mismatch to recover the original, readable text.

How do I fix text like café or ’?

Paste it into the box above. With auto-detect on, the tool tries each likely encoding, scores the results, and shows the cleanest recovery first — usually turning café back into café.

Why can't some text be recovered?

Recovery works when the garble came from a reversible single-byte encoding mismatch. If the text was double-encoded, truncated, or passed through a lossy step, some characters may be unrecoverable and show as � (the replacement character).

Is my text uploaded?

No. It is processed entirely in your browser with the built-in TextEncoder/TextDecoder APIs.