Character Encoding Detector

Text becomes garbled when opened with the wrong encoding. If a file was saved as UTF-8 but opened as ISO-8859-1 (or vice versa), characters display incorrectly. Detecting the actual encoding lets you open it correctly.

UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding that can represent any Unicode character. It's backward-compatible with ASCII and has become the standard for web content and modern systems. Most new text should use UTF-8.

Detection accuracy depends on text length and character variety. Longer text with special characters (accents, symbols) is easier to identify. Short plain ASCII text is ambiguous since many encodings are identical for basic characters.

A BOM is a special byte sequence at the start of a file that identifies its encoding. UTF-8's BOM is EF BB BF. UTF-16 uses FF FE or FE FF. When present, BOMs provide definitive encoding identification.

Yes, especially for ASCII characters (0-127) which are identical across many encodings. Detection relies on non-ASCII characters to distinguish encodings. Pure ASCII text is compatible with UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, and others.