Focused purpose
What this tool does
Fix UTF-8, BOM, Windows-1252 or Latin-1 CSV text locally. Compare decoding previews for é, ’ and Â, then export UTF-8 without an account.
- ✓ UTF-8 and BOM detection
- ✓ Windows-1252 and Latin-1 previews
- ✓ Mojibake pattern warnings
- ✓ Replacement-character comparison
Workflow
How to use it
- 01
Open the garbled file and inspect candidate encodings.
- 02
Choose the readable preview and confirm parsing.
- 03
Export a newly encoded UTF-8 copy.
Available controls
Available options
- Compare candidate decodings side by side.
- Export UTF-8 with or without BOM.
- Confirm delimiter independently from encoding.
- Preserve original bytes until export.
UTF-8 mojibake
Example before and after
UTF-8 bytes were interpreted as Windows-1252 and displayed as mojibake.
Before
name,city André,Montréal
After
name,city André,Montréal
Expected result: The chosen decoding restores accented characters and exports UTF-8.
Practical scenarios
Common use cases
Repair é and ’ sequences.
Prepare a legacy export for a UTF-8 API.
Create an Excel-friendly UTF-8 BOM file.
HONEST LIMITS
Important limitations
- iWithout a BOM, some byte sequences are valid in more than one encoding.
- iRe-encoding cannot recover characters already replaced by question marks in the source.
FAQ
Questions about this tool
Why does my CSV show é instead of é?
UTF-8 bytes were probably decoded with a legacy single-byte encoding. Compare previews before converting.
Should I export UTF-8 or UTF-8 with BOM?
Use plain UTF-8 for most systems; use BOM when a target spreadsheet explicitly needs the signature.
Can encoding detection be wrong?
Yes. Without a BOM or language context, multiple decodings can be plausible, so confirmation is required.