Mojibake (Garbled Japanese) Decoder
Runs in your browserNothing is uploadedThis runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
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.
Input
Output
Paste garbled text and the likely originals appear here.
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Why this one
- Every combination is tried
- It works through every pairing of "written in encoding X, read as encoding Y" and ranks the results by how much like real Japanese they read. You do not need to know anything about encodings. Even with five candidates, reading down the list finds the one that makes sense immediately.
- It names the cause
- Each candidate comes with the mistake that produced it — "Shift_JIS text read as UTF-8". If the same sender keeps producing the same garbling, the fix has to happen at their end, and being able to say "you are sending Shift_JIS" instead of "your text is garbled" shortens that conversation considerably.
- The text is not sent anywhere
- Email bodies and internal filenames pasted here stay on the device. What is garbled is usually a client's name or address — exactly the sort of data you would rather not paste into someone else's service.
How to use
Paste the garbled text
An email body, part of a CSV, a filename. Surrounding text that is not garbled does no harm.
Read the candidates
Up to five, ordered by how plausible the Japanese is. The top one is usually right, and each carries the encoding mistake that produced it.
Copy it
Press copy on the correct candidate. Keeping the stated cause is useful when you report it back to the sender.
Recognising the pattern
- Lots of 縺, 繧 and 譁
- The classic signature of UTF-8 text read as Shift_JIS. It shows up in Windows Notepad, in older software, and when a CSV is opened directly in Excel. This form almost always recovers cleanly — paste it and the original comes straight back.
- Lots of Ã, æ and ã
- UTF-8 read as Latin-1 (Windows-1252). Foreign systems, English-language mail clients and misconfigured older web servers all produce it. The giveaway is one character apparently becoming two or three.
- Everything became ? or □
- That is not garbling but deletion: characters that could not be represented were thrown away. The original bytes are gone, so neither this tool nor any other can bring them back — the only fix is to ask for the text again. A row of □ can also mean the characters survived but the display font has no glyph for them, in which case another font shows them fine.
- Why some garbling recovers and some does not
- A misreading leaves the bytes untouched, so reading them differently restores the text. But once a "cannot represent this, substitute ?" step has run, those bytes have been discarded and nothing anywhere retains the information. That distinction decides recoverability, which is why it is worth copying garbled text somewhere before saving over it.
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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