# What Is Mojibake? — Why Text Turns Into ’, é and �

Canonical: https://commareports.com/glossary/mojibake
Published: 2026-10-14

> Mojibake is garbled text produced by decoding bytes with the wrong character encoding. How UTF-8 read as Windows-1252 becomes ’ and é, why the reverse gives �, and which kind can be repaired.

# Mojibake

**Mojibake is garbled text produced when bytes written in one character
encoding are decoded with a different one.** The bytes are intact; the
reader's map from bytes to characters is wrong. The word is Japanese —
文字化け, "character transformation" — from a time when Shift-JIS,
EUC-JP and ISO-2022-JP files were routinely opened with the wrong one.

## The Western classic: UTF-8 read as Windows-1252

UTF-8 writes every character outside ASCII as two to four bytes.
Windows-1252 maps each single byte to its own character. Read one as the
other and every accented letter or curly quote multiplies:

| Character | UTF-8 bytes | Read as Windows-1252 |
| --------- | ----------- | -------------------- |
| `é`       | `C3 A9`     | `é`                 |
| `ü`       | `C3 BC`     | `ü`                 |
| `’`       | `E2 80 99`  | `’`                |
| `—`       | `E2 80 94`  | `—`                |
| `€`       | `E2 82 AC`  | `€`                |

Spotting it is easy once you know the tell: a capital `Ã` or a `â€`
pair where a single character should be.

## The other direction: �

Decode a Windows-1252 or Latin-1 file as UTF-8 and the single byte `E9`
(`é`) is not a valid UTF-8 sequence. The decoder replaces it with U+FFFD,
`�`. Technically not mojibake — no wrong character was chosen — but it is
the same mistake, and it is worse: the original byte is gone.

## Repairing it

| Symptom     | Recoverable? | How                                        |
| ----------- | ------------ | ------------------------------------------ |
| `é`, `’` | Yes          | `s.encode("cp1252").decode("utf-8")`       |
| `é`      | Yes          | Reverse twice, or `ftfy.fix_text(s)`       |
| `�`         | No           | Go back to the original file and re-decode |

The real fix is upstream: write files as UTF-8 and declare it — a
`<meta charset="utf-8">` in HTML, `charset=utf-8` in the HTTP
`Content-Type`, or a [byte order mark](/glossary/byte-order-mark) where
the reader (Excel) ignores everything else.

## In HTML reports

A browser picks an encoding from, in order, a BOM, the HTTP header, a
`<meta charset>` in the first 1024 bytes, and finally a guess. A
generated report opened straight from disk has no header, so a missing
meta tag means the browser is guessing — and on many systems it guesses
Windows-1252. [Every `’` in an HTML page](/fix/html-weird-characters)
traces back to that chain.

## Try it

Comma is free — unlimited reports, unlimited commenters, unlimited
revision history.

**[Fix ’ and é in an HTML page →](/fix/html-weird-characters)**

### Related

- [Byte order mark](/glossary/byte-order-mark) · [MIME type](/glossary/mime-type) · [NDJSON](/glossary/ndjson)
- [CSV opens wrong in Excel](/fix/csv-opens-wrong-in-excel) · [HTML escape](/tools/html-escape)
- [Glossary](/glossary)