Fixing garbled text

Accented letters turn into é, dashes into –, and apostrophes into ’. Or two words that look identical won’t match, a CSV won’t import, or a script fails on a line that looks fine. The cause is almost always characters: text read in the wrong encoding, or characters you can’t see. These tools find and fix both, in your browser.

1. Repair the encoding

Text like café is UTF-8 that a program read as Windows-1252 (or Latin-1). Paste it, or drop the file, on the Encoding Fixer with Repair garbled characters ticked. It mends each garbled run in place, even when it was garbled twice, and leaves real accented letters alone. For a file, it also detects the file’s own encoding and saves a UTF-8 copy. Tick Start saved files with a UTF-8 BOM if Excel is going to open it.

2. See what the characters really are

When it still looks wrong, paste a little of it into the Character Inspector. Every character is listed with its code point and UTF-8 bytes, so a non-breaking space, a curly quote or a stray control character stands out. It also says whether accents are stored composed (NFC) or decomposed (NFD): file names from a Mac are often decomposed, which is why café from one place doesn’t match café from another. Convert to composed fixes that. Paste the other copy into Compare with other text to see whether the two are identical, equal once normalised, or truly different, and where they first differ. Under the table, every space, tab and invisible character is shown, so a non-breaking space or spaces at the end of a line stand out. Read in another encoding shows what the bytes look like to other programs, to work out which mistake happened.

3. Remove the invisible characters

Text pasted from web pages, chat apps and AI tools can carry zero-width spaces, joiners, tag characters and direction marks. Paste it under Find and reveal in Hidden Text: it counts every invisible character, decodes any message hidden in them, and gives a clean copy.

4. Tidy the rest

For quotes, dashes and spaces from Word, build a recipe in Text Cleaner. Remove invisible characters also turns non-breaking spaces into plain ones; Characters and punctuation can make curly quotes straight and dashes into hyphens; Trim spaces from each line and Remove blank lines finish the job. Save as… keeps the recipe for next time.

5. When letters only look right

If a name or address looks correct but still doesn’t match, a letter may come from another alphabet: Cyrillic а and о look exactly like Latin ones. Lookalike Characters marks each one and shows what the text reads as in plain letters.