Convert Windows-1253 to UTF-8 (Greek)

When do you need to convert?

• Exports from Greek accounting, payroll or ERP software in Windows-1253 that must go into a system that only accepts UTF-8.
• Old Greek websites, databases, forums and subtitle files saved in Windows-1253.
• A file saved in Notepad as “ANSI” on a Greek Windows PC and then opened in an editor or program that expects UTF-8.
• Old e-mails and archives in ISO-8859-7.

Where do Windows-1253 files come from?

Windows-1253 is the “ANSI” code page of Greek Windows, or of any Windows where the language for non-Unicode programs is set to Greek in the region settings. Every program that saves text in the system’s default encoding then writes Windows-1253 files:

• Notepad in older Windows versions – it saved as ANSI by default until about 2019.
• Excel when saving as plain CSV (Comma delimited).
• Older accounting and inventory software, and databases set to cp1253 – or to greek in MySQL, which is ISO-8859-7.
• Greek subtitle files, websites and forums from the last twenty years.

Ïäüò Åãíáôßáò 12, Èåóóáëïíßêç
ÔçëÝöùíï: 2310 123456
ÔéìÞ: 120,00 €

Οδός Εγνατίας 12, Θεσσαλονίκη
Τηλέφωνο: 2310 123456
Τιμή: 120,00 €

What do the letters look like when read wrong?

In Windows-1253 every Greek letter is one byte, mostly between C1 and FE. When a Western program reads that byte as Windows-1252, you see a Latin letter with an accent:

• α → byte E1 → á
• ε → byte E5 → å
• λ → byte EB → ë
• μ → byte EC → ì
• ρ → byte F1 → ñ
• έ → byte DD → Ý

That’s why Καλημέρα turns into ÊáëçìÝñá, while € stays the same – it has the same byte in both code pages. You can paste such text straight into the box, and Mojibuster turns it back into Greek.

How to convert

1. Drag the file into the box above.
2. Mojibuster detects Windows-1253, ISO-8859-7 and UTF-8 automatically and shows which encoding it used to read the file.
3. Click Download to save the file as UTF-8.

Windows-1253 vs. ISO-8859-7

ISO-8859-7 (formerly also ELOT 928) is the older standard, used in e-mail, on websites and on Unix systems. Windows-1253 is almost the same: α to ω and most capitals sit in the same positions. A few spots differ – Ά is byte A2 in Windows-1253 but B6 in ISO-8859-7, so with Western settings it shows as ¢ or ¶. Windows-1253 also has typographic quotes, dashes and other symbols in the range 80–9F.

So an ISO-8859-7 file is nearly always read correctly as Windows-1253 too, except for Ά. Mojibuster checks both and keeps the one that gives clean Greek. Greeklish (Kalimera) is not an encoding error: it is Greek written in Latin letters on purpose, and Mojibuster leaves it alone.

Converting on the command line

To convert many files at once on Linux or Mac, this command is enough:

iconv -f CP1253 -t UTF-8 in.txt > out.txt

And in PowerShell 7 on Windows:

Get-Content -Encoding 1253 in.txt | Set-Content -Encoding utf8 out.txt

Note that these commands assume you know the file’s encoding. If the file is already UTF-8, you get new garbage such as αβγ. Mojibuster checks the file first and only converts it if the result is clean Greek text.

What can’t be recovered?

Letters that turned into ? can’t be restored, because the information was lost when the file was saved. Mojibuster shows how many there are – see question marks instead of characters.

The same goes for characters Windows-1253 doesn’t have, such as emoji, Cyrillic or polytonic letters like ἀ and ῆ: when the file is saved as ANSI, they become ? for good. If you see � in a modern editor, the letters are still in the original file and can be converted.

The reverse case – UTF-8 read as Windows-1253, with Ξ and Ο everywhere, like Ξ±Ξ²Ξ³ instead of αβγ – turns ρ, ψ, ό, ύ, ώ and several capitals into invisible control characters. Mojibuster repairs that too, but if those characters were deleted while copying, the letters are missing. Then drop the original file instead.

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