Text Encoding Converter
Fix garbled text (mojibake) and convert files between UTF-8, ANSI/Windows-1252 and Latin-1 — in your browser.
✓ Your files never leave your device. Everything runs locally in your browser.
Text that appears as strange characters such as ä, ’ or  is usually a character-encoding mismatch: a file saved in one encoding is being read as another. This tool reads a file with the correct source encoding and writes it back in the encoding you need.
Everything runs locally — your file is never uploaded.
How it works
- Choose a file – Pick a text file (.txt, .csv, .json, .xml, .html, …) from your device.
- Set the source encoding – Auto-detect works for UTF-8 and files with a BOM; it falls back to Windows-1252 when the bytes are not valid UTF-8.
- Choose the output encoding – For web and Linux, UTF-8 is almost always right. For older Windows software, choose ANSI (Windows-1252).
- Convert and download – Download the re-encoded file and open it in the application that had the problem.
Common use cases
- A CSV exported by an old tool opens with broken umlauts or accents in Excel.
- A file looks fine on Linux but is garbled in a Windows editor.
- Fixing
ä/ö/üback toä/ö/ü. - Preparing legacy files so they display correctly as UTF-8 on the web.
Why ANSI and UTF-8 differ
UTF-8 stores every character with one to four bytes, while ANSI (Windows-1252) uses a single byte per character and only covers Western European scripts. When a byte sequence is interpreted with the wrong scheme, the wrong characters appear — that is what we fix here.
Frequently asked questions
Is my file uploaded?
No. The conversion happens entirely in your browser; your file never leaves your device.
Which encodings are supported?
UTF-8, UTF-16 (detected via BOM), Windows-1252/ANSI and ISO-8859-1/Latin-1. Auto-detect handles the most common cases.
Will it fix my umlauts?
Yes — if the problem is an encoding mismatch, re-encoding to the right charset restores the correct characters.
What does mojibake mean?
It is the name for garbled text that appears when bytes are decoded with the wrong character encoding.
Related tools
Fix your text encoding now — free, private and without uploading a file.