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Mojibake decoder

Paste garbled text and the likely originals appear here.

Paste text that came out garbled from an email, a CSV or a ZIP file name. The tool tries every UTF-8 / Shift_JIS / EUC-JP / ISO-2022-JP / UTF-16 misreading and lists the most Japanese-looking originals first, with the cause of each.

FAQ

Can I give it a file directly?

It works on text. If a file's contents are garbled, open it in a text editor and paste the affected part. To re-encode a whole file, an editor's "reopen with encoding" command is the more reliable route.

What about garbled filenames in a ZIP?

Usually the extractor read Shift_JIS names as UTF-8, and this tool recovers them — though renaming the extracted files is manual work. The ZIP format did eventually gain a way to declare the filename encoding, but older software does not write it, so receivers are still left guessing.

CSV files always garble in Excel.

Excel reads a UTF-8 CSV as Shift_JIS unless it carries a BOM. Rather than double-clicking the file, use Data > From Text/CSV and specify UTF-8. If you are the one exporting the CSV, saving as UTF-8 with BOM stops it garbling at the other end.

Only the email subject is garbled.

Subjects are encoded by a separate mechanism (MIME encoded-words), and the settings can disagree there alone. Paste the raw subject if you can extract it. If it still looks like =?UTF-8?B?…?=, that is not garbling — it is the encoded form, not yet decoded.

Is my input stored?

No, and nothing is sent. It is all processed in the browser and gone when you close the tab.

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