What is mojibake?

Where the word comes from

Mojibake (文字化け) is Japanese: “moji” means “character” and “bake” means “transformation”. In the 1990s, Japanese computers used several encodings side by side – Shift_JIS, EUC-JP and ISO-2022-JP – so garbled e-mails and web pages were an everyday sight. The word stuck and moved into English.

How mojibake happens

Computers store text as bytes. An encoding defines which bytes stand for which character. In UTF-8, é is stored as the two bytes C3 A9. A program that reads these bytes as Windows-1252 shows one character per byte: Ã for C3 and © for A9.

Nothing is lost in this step – the bytes are still there, they are only read the wrong way. That is why mojibake can usually be undone: Mojibuster turns the wrong characters back into bytes and reads them correctly.

Café, naïve, résumé – €5

Café, naïve, résumé – €5

Mojibake in other languages

• Japanese: 縺薙ｓ縺ｫ縺｡縺ｯ instead of こんにちは – UTF-8 read as Shift_JIS. More on the Japanese page.
• Chinese: 浣犲ソ instead of 你好 – UTF-8 read as GBK. In Chinese it is called 乱码 (luànmǎ, “chaotic code”).
• Russian: Привет instead of Привет – UTF-8 read as Windows-1251. Russians call it “krakozyabry”.
• Western languages: ä, ñ or € instead of ä, ñ or € – the most common form worldwide.

Typical causes

• Excel opens a UTF-8 CSV file without a BOM as ANSI: fix special characters in Excel.
• A database connection uses latin1 while the data is UTF-8: WordPress & database.
• A website or e-mail declares the wrong charset – for e-mails, see the Outlook guide.
• Subtitles were saved in an old code page: convert SRT to UTF-8.
• Text that is already broken gets converted again – double mojibake like é: fix double-encoded UTF-8.

Can mojibake always be fixed?

Almost always, as long as the bytes are still intact. It becomes impossible once a program has replaced the characters with ? or the replacement character � – the original information is gone then. Mojibuster repairs everything that can be repaired and tells you how many spots are lost. More: question marks instead of characters.

How to prevent mojibake

• Save files as UTF-8 – CSV files for Excel as UTF-8 with BOM.
• Declare the encoding: <meta charset="utf-8"> in HTML, utf8mb4 in MySQL and MariaDB.
• Convert text only once, at the boundary between two systems.
• When importing, choose the encoding explicitly instead of letting the program guess.

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.
• 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.
• Question marks instead of characters ? or � instead of letters – what can be rescued and what can’t.
• 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.
• Big5, GBK, Shift_JIS → UTF-8 Convert old Chinese, Japanese and Korean files to UTF-8.
• For businesses & data protection officers How Mojibuster protects data – and how to verify it yourself.