Fix Broken Text Encoding

Mojibake is garbled text that results when text encoded in one character encoding is incorrectly decoded using a different encoding. Common examples: "café" instead of "cafe", or "ü" instead of "u". The term comes from Japanese meaning "character transformation."

This specific pattern occurs when UTF-8 encoded text (where "e" is two bytes: C3 A9) is read as Windows-1252 or Latin-1 (where each byte is a separate character: Ã and ©). The tool reverses this misinterpretation.

Most common mojibake patterns can be repaired if the original encoding is determinable from the corruption pattern. However, some data loss can occur if the wrong encoding completely mangles bytes into unrecoverable characters, especially with non-Latin scripts.

Always use UTF-8 explicitly everywhere: file encoding, database connections, HTML charset declarations, and API communications. Don't rely on default encodings, which vary by system. Consistent UTF-8 use prevents most encoding problems.

Text can be double or triple encoded, creating layered corruption. The tool attempts to detect and fix multiple encoding layers. Very complex cases may need multiple repair passes or manual analysis to determine the encoding chain.