Convert EUC-KR and CP949 files to UTF-8

When you need this

• CSV files from Korean government portals, banks and card companies, or from accounting software, that you open on a Mac, in Google Sheets or in a UTF-8-only system.
• Order and customer exports from older Korean shop solutions and ERP systems.
• Files saved as “ANSI” in Notepad on a Korean Windows, read by an editor or program that expects UTF-8 – in Notepad++ you can also convert directly.
• Old websites, bulletin board archives and server logs stored in EUC-KR.
• Subtitle files (.srt, .smi) in CP949 that show garbage on a TV – see fix subtitle encoding.

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How to convert

1. Drag the file into the box above or choose it – CSV, TXT, SRT, SMI, JSON and other text formats work.
2. Mojibuster reads the file as CP949 (which contains EUC-KR) and UTF-8 and keeps the reading that produces real Korean. The result shows which code page it used.
3. Click Download to save the UTF-8 file. For CSV files keep Save with BOM on so Excel opens them correctly.

EUC-KR and CP949

EUC-KR contains only the 2,350 most common Hangul syllables. Windows’ CP949 (Unified Hangul Code) adds the rest, such as 똠 and 뷁, and covers all 11,172 modern syllables. Mojibuster reads with CP949, so those characters convert correctly as well.

Characters and bytes

• 가 = B0 A1, 한 = C7 D1, 글 = B1 DB (the same in EUC-KR and CP949)
• 똠 = 8C 63, 뷁 = 94 EE (CP949 only)
• 한글 opened with Western settings (Windows-1252) shows as ÇѱÛ; UTF-8 Hangul read as Windows-1252 looks like 한글 instead – see what mojibake is.

Converting on the command line

On Linux and macOS one line does it: iconv -f CP949 -t UTF-8 in.txt > out.txt. In PowerShell 7: Get-Content in.txt -Encoding 949 | Set-Content out.txt -Encoding utf8 – the differences are explained in fix PowerShell encoding. These commands don’t guess the code page; with only a few files, the box above is faster.

What can’t be restored

Characters that have already become ? are gone: the information was lost when the file was saved. Mojibuster shows how many such spots the file contains. Korean saved as ??? in a database is explained under fix MySQL encoding. Files from Japan or China use other code pages – see the converters for Shift_JIS, GBK and Big5.

Frequently asked questions

More guides

• Mojibake fixer for all kinds of text Repair garbled characters in text and files.
• Fix CSV encoding Repair special characters in CSV exports and save as UTF-8.
• Excel characters When Excel shows é instead of é after opening a CSV.
• Fix UTF-8 Remove mojibake from databases, emails and websites.
• Fix subtitles Repair SRT and VTT subtitles with broken characters.
• What is mojibake? Meaning, origin and causes of garbled text.
• Double-encoded When é first became é and then é.
• é instead of é Table of é, ñ, ü and more – and what’s behind them.
• Apostrophes & quotes ’, “, – and … instead of apostrophes, quotes and dashes.
• ANSI → UTF-8 Convert old ANSI files to UTF-8 without losing accented characters.
• Question marks instead of characters ? or � instead of letters – what can be rescued and what can’t.
• ‚Äô instead of ’ Mojibake from a Mac: ’, é – and é from the Windows console.
• URL-encoded characters %C3%A9 instead of é – make percent codes from links and forms readable.
• WordPress & database Repair SQL dumps and WordPress content showing é instead of é.
• MySQL & phpMyAdmin Set the charset of table, connection and import correctly.
• Outlook Fix broken characters in e-mails and contact exports.
• PowerShell -Encoding, console and script files in PowerShell 5.1 and 7.
• Python & pandas encoding in read_csv, to_csv, open() and requests.
• Notepad++ Choose or convert the encoding – the crucial difference.
• Customer data & CRM Repair customer lists from CRM and ERP without uploading them.
• Shift_JIS → UTF-8 Convert Shift_JIS (CP932) and EUC-JP files from Japan to UTF-8.
• GBK → UTF-8 Convert GBK, GB2312 and GB18030 files from mainland China to UTF-8.
• Big5 → UTF-8 Convert Big5 (CP950, HKSCS) files from Taiwan or Hong Kong to UTF-8.
• Windows-1251 → UTF-8 Convert old Russian files (cp1251, KOI8-R, CP866) to UTF-8.
• Windows-1256 to UTF-8 Converts old Arabic files (cp1256, Arabic ANSI) to UTF-8.
• Windows-1253 to UTF-8 Converts old Greek files (cp1253, ISO-8859-7) to UTF-8.
• Windows-1255 to UTF-8 Converts old Hebrew files (cp1255, ISO-8859-8) to UTF-8.
• Windows-1250 → UTF-8 Converts old Polish and Central European files to UTF-8.
• Big5, GBK, Shift_JIS → UTF-8 Convert old Chinese, Japanese and Korean files to UTF-8.
• Hindi, Tamil, Bengali text Hindi, Tamil or Bengali text shows à¤, à® or à¦? Repair it here.
• Kruti Dev to Unicode Hindi typed in Kruti Dev shows up as fgUnh? Convert it to Unicode.
• Preeti to Unicode Nepali typed in Preeti shows up as g]kfn? Convert it to Unicode.
• Bijoy to Unicode Bengali typed in Bijoy shows up as evsjv? Convert it to Unicode.
• For businesses & data protection officers How Mojibuster protects data – and how to verify it yourself.