Convert Windows-1255 to UTF-8 (Hebrew)

When do you need to convert?

• Exports from Israeli accounting, payroll or inventory software in Windows-1255 that must go into a system that only accepts UTF-8.
• Old Hebrew websites, databases, forums and subtitle files saved in Windows-1255.
• A file saved in Notepad as “ANSI” on a Hebrew Windows PC and then opened in an editor or program that expects UTF-8.
• Old e-mails and archives in ISO-8859-8.

Where do Windows-1255 files come from?

Windows-1255 is the “ANSI” code page of Hebrew Windows, or of any Windows where the language for non-Unicode programs is set to Hebrew in the region settings. Every program that saves text in the system’s default encoding then writes Windows-1255 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 cp1255 – or to hebrew in MySQL, which is ISO-8859-8.
• Hebrew subtitle files, websites and forums from the last twenty years.

øçåá äøöì 12, çéôä
èìôåï: 04-8123456
îçéø: 120 ¤

רחוב הרצל 12, חיפה
טלפון: 04-8123456
מחיר: 120 ₪

What do the letters look like when read wrong?

In Windows-1255 every Hebrew letter is one byte, from E0 to FA. When a Western program reads that byte as Windows-1252, you see a Latin letter with an accent:

• א → byte E0 → à
• ב → byte E1 → á
• ו → byte E5 → å
• ל → byte EC → ì
• ש → byte F9 → ù
• ת → byte FA → ú

That’s why שלום turns into ùìåí, and the shekel sign ₪ shows as ¤. You can paste such text straight into the box, and Mojibuster turns it back into Hebrew.

How to convert

1. Drag the file into the box above.
2. Mojibuster detects Windows-1255, ISO-8859-8 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-1255 vs. ISO-8859-8

ISO-8859-8 is the older standard, common in e-mail, on websites and on Unix systems. Windows-1255 builds on it: א to ת sit in the same positions, but Windows-1255 adds vowel points (niqqud), the shekel sign ₪ and typographic quotes. So an ISO-8859-8 file is usually read correctly as Windows-1255 too.

One important difference is “visual” Hebrew. Old websites, teletext and legacy systems stored ISO-8859-8 text in reverse order, last letter first, so that a left-to-right screen showed it correctly. In a modern browser it looks backwards: םולש instead of שלום. That isn’t an encoding error, and Mojibuster doesn’t reverse the letters. Hebrew in normal (“logical”) order is labelled ISO-8859-8-I in e-mails and on websites.

Converting on the command line

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

iconv -f CP1255 -t UTF-8 in.txt > out.txt

And in PowerShell 7 on Windows:

Get-Content -Encoding 1255 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 ש×. Mojibuster checks the file first and only converts it if the result is clean Hebrew 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-1255 doesn’t have, such as emoji, Arabic or Cyrillic letters: 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-1255, with ׳ before every letter, like ׳§׳•׳‘׳¥ instead of קובץ – turns א, ל, מ, ך, ם and ן 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.

Frequently asked questions

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