Mojibuster

Fix garbled characters and broken encoding

Seeing é instead of é or ’ instead of ’? Paste the text or drop the file – Mojibuster turns it back into readable text instantly.

Works with text and these files:

  • CSV
  • TXT
  • JSON
  • XML
  • SRT
  • VTT
  • TSV
  • MD
  • HTML
  • SQL
  • LOG

For example Excel exports, database dumps, subtitles or website code.

Repair

  1. Drop a file or paste text
  2. It gets repaired automatically
  3. Copy or download
or simply drag a file here

  • No upload. Your files are repaired right in your browser and never leave your device.

  • Servers in the EU. Mojibuster runs on a server in Finland (EU), so the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies. Read the GDPR (EUR-Lex)

Why Mojibuster?

Fixing garbled characters is one thing. Doing it without handing over your data is what makes the difference.

Privacy & trust

  • No upload

    Texts and files are repaired right in your browser and never leave your device – even 100 MB files.

  • Servers in the EU

    The website runs on a Hetzner server in Finland. The GDPR applies.

  • No tracking

    No analytics, no ads, no tracking cookies, no sign-up. Fonts and icons are served from our own server.

Reliable repair

  • Repairs instead of guessing

    Only what is clearly broken gets replaced. Correct accents, umlauts and emojis stay untouched.

  • Even double-broken text

    é turns back into é in one go – up to three levels of errors at once.

  • Detects the encoding itself

    UTF-8, UTF-16 and Windows-1252 (ANSI) are detected automatically and saved as UTF-8.

  • Every change visible

    “What changed?” shows every repaired spot with its line number.

Everyday use

  • Works with Excel

    Saved with a BOM if you like, so Excel shows accented letters correctly on double-click.

  • Many formats, large files

    CSV, TXT, JSON, XML, subtitles and more text files up to 100 MB – large files in seconds.

  • Free and instant

    No account, no installation – on phone, tablet and desktop.

Why do characters turn into gibberish?

UTF-8 stores an é as two bytes. When a program reads those bytes with the wrong character table – usually Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 –, each byte becomes a character of its own: é turns into é and € into €.

This garbled text is called mojibake, Japanese for “transformed characters”. It shows up when opening CSV files in Excel, with misconfigured databases, in emails or in subtitles.

How Mojibuster repairs your text

Mojibuster spots the typical patterns, converts them back to the original bytes and reads them correctly as UTF-8. That even works for double-broken text like é. Correct characters stay untouched – only what is clearly broken gets replaced.

Everything happens in your browser. Your texts and files are not uploaded and not stored anywhere.

Common broken characters

What garbled characters typically look like – and what they should say.
Broken Correct
ää
öö
üü
ßß
ÄÄ
ÖÖ
ÃœÜ
éé
èè
çç
ññ
€€
„„
““
’’
––
——
……
塡

Frequently asked questions

What is mojibake?

It’s the name for garbled text like é instead of é. It appears when text is read with a different character encoding than the one it was saved in.

Are my files uploaded?

No. Mojibuster runs entirely in your browser. Your texts and files never leave your device and are not stored anywhere.

Can Mojibuster fix every error?

Almost every one: single and repeated encoding errors, files in Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 and HTML codes like é. If a program already saved broken characters as ? or �, the information is gone – Mojibuster tells you when that’s the case.

Which files can I repair?

Any text file, for example CSV, TXT, JSON, XML, subtitles (SRT, VTT), Markdown, HTML, SQL and log files – up to 100 MB.

How much does Mojibuster cost?

Nothing. Mojibuster is free, needs no sign-up and shows no ads.

More guides

  • Fix CSV encoding Repair special characters in CSV exports and save as UTF-8.
  • Excel characters When Excel shows é instead of é after opening a CSV.
  • Fix UTF-8 Remove mojibake from databases, emails and websites.
  • Fix subtitles Repair SRT and VTT subtitles with broken characters.