Encoding Converter - Free Online Tool

Last updated March 22, 2026

Common Encoding Issues

• Mojibake — garbled text from reading a file with the wrong encoding
• Question marks or boxes replacing characters — encoding mismatch
• Accented characters showing as two characters — UTF-8 read as Latin-1
• Smart quotes showing as “ — Windows-1252 read as UTF-8

Encoding Quick Reference

• UTF-8 — universal, handles all Unicode, web standard, use this by default
• UTF-16 — used internally by Windows, Java, JavaScript strings
• ASCII — English only, 7-bit, legacy systems
• ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) — Western European, legacy web pages
• Windows-1252 — Windows Western European, Excel exports
• UTF-8 with BOM — UTF-8 with a byte order mark, Excel compatibility

Use TechConverter's Text Encoding Converter to convert text between any encoding instantly in your browser — no data is sent to any server.

Input (UTF-8):   "Café résumé naïve"
Output (ASCII):  "Cafe resume naive"

Note: ASCII cannot represent accented characters.
The converter replaces them with their closest ASCII equivalents
or marks them as unconvertible.

Problem: A CSV file exported from Excel shows garbled text:
  "é" instead of "é"
  "“" instead of """
  "’" instead of "'"

Cause: File is Windows-1252 encoded but being read as UTF-8.

Fix: Convert from Windows-1252 to UTF-8:
  Input encoding:  Windows-1252
  Output encoding: UTF-8
  Input:  "élève"
  Output: "élève"

# Read a file with unknown encoding and convert to UTF-8
import chardet

# Detect encoding
with open('legacy_file.txt', 'rb') as f:
    raw = f.read()
    detected = chardet.detect(raw)
    print(f"Detected encoding: {detected['encoding']}")  # e.g., 'ISO-8859-1'

# Convert to UTF-8
text = raw.decode(detected['encoding'])
with open('converted_file.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:
    f.write(text)