Web Tools tools.bryantsmith.com

Creative Workflow Helpers

Mojibake Repair Helper

Paste text that shows up as café or ’ and instantly see the encoding mistake behind it plus the most likely repair. Runs entirely in your browser — your text never leaves the page.

Runs in your browser v1.0.0

Detection

waiting

Paste some text to check for mojibake.

Garbled text

input

Paste or type text as it appears. Repairs preview live — nothing is uploaded.

Repaired text

live

Waiting for input

How it works

Mojibake happens when UTF-8 bytes are read as a single-byte encoding. For example café becomes café when viewed as ISO-8859-1, and a curly apostrophe becomes ’ when viewed as Windows-1252. This tool reinterprets the visible characters as the original bytes and decodes them back as UTF-8, then shows every plausible reading. It also flags unrecoverable damage such as the replacement character �, which means bytes were already lost before you saw them.

Related tools

  • Unicode Character InspectorInspect any character as grapheme clusters, code points, Unicode names, categories and UTF-8/UTF-16 encodings — entirely in your browser.
  • .env Compare & MergeCompare development, staging, and production .env key sets without exposing secret values, then build a merged template.
  • Accessible Name CalculatorPaste HTML, pick an element, and see the accessible name assistive technology computes — entirely in your browser.
  • Apache Rewrite TesterTest Apache mod_rewrite rules against a sample request path and see the rewritten URL, redirects, captures and warnings.
  • Cookie Builder & InspectorBuild a Set-Cookie header or paste one to inspect its expiry, path, domain, Secure, HttpOnly and SameSite attributes — entirely in your browser.
  • CORS Header Builder & ExplainerModel a cross-origin request and get the exact CORS response headers to send, explained in plain language.

More Creative Workflow Helpers tools