🧹 Cleaning

Fix Garbled Text (Mojibake)

Excel turned your export into “café” and “don’t”? Paste it back in and get the real characters back — lines that were fine stay untouched.

  • 100% free, no limits
  • No sign-up
  • Your data never leaves your browser
  • Results in under a second
Use the Fix Garbled Text (Mojibake) tool now ↓ Open it in the full Notepad

Free tool Paste your list — the Fix Garbled Text (Mojibake) tool does the rest

The example below is already loaded, so you can see exactly what you get. Replace it with your own list and the result updates as you type.

Got a bigger job? The full Notepad runs the same engine on lists of any size — chain this with dedupe, sort and filter, undo any step, and save the whole routine as a recipe for next time.

Example Fix Garbled Text (Mojibake) tool: before and after

Before
café near me
don’t miss
already fine é
After
café near me
don’t miss
already fine é

How it works What the Fix Garbled Text (Mojibake) tool does

Repairs text that was saved as UTF-8 but opened as Windows-1252 — “café” back to “café”, “don’t” to “don’t”. Lines that aren’t garbled are left untouched.

“café” and “don’t” are what text looks like when UTF-8 has been read as Windows-1252, which is common in CSV files opened in Excel and old database exports. This operation reverses the mistake: it takes the garbled characters back to their original bytes and decodes them as UTF-8, giving “café” and “don’t”.

Lines that are already correct are left alone, so it is safe to run on a whole list where only some lines are broken.

3 steps How to use the Fix Garbled Text (Mojibake) tool

  1. Paste your list into the box above — one item per line. Keyword exports, crawl exports and spreadsheet columns all work.
  2. Check the settings and adjust them to your job — the result updates as you type.
  3. Copy the result and paste it wherever it needs to go. Nothing is uploaded, so client and confidential data stay on your machine.

Use it to When to use the Fix Garbled Text (Mojibake) tool

  • Repair a keyword export that went through Excel and came back garbled
  • Fix product names from an old database or feed with broken accents
  • Clean scraped titles from sites with a wrong character-set header

FAQ Fix Garbled Text (Mojibake) tool questions

Is Fix Garbled Characters free to use?

Yes. Fix Garbled Characters runs entirely in your browser, on this page and in the full Notepad, with no sign-up, no limits, and nothing sent to a server.

What is mojibake?

Garbled text caused by decoding characters with the wrong encoding, usually UTF-8 read as Windows-1252 or Latin-1.

Can it fix text that was garbled twice?

Run it a second time. Each run undoes one layer of wrong decoding.

Pairs well with More Cleaning tools, all free

🧹 Emoji Remover

Emoji break spreadsheet imports and word counts. Strip every one of them in one click and keep the rest of th…

🧹 Remove Non-Latin Lines

Global keyword exports mix in queries you can’t use. Remove every line written in another script and keep you…

🧹 Remove Empty Lines & Trim Spaces

Copy a list from anywhere and you get stray spaces and blank rows that break every tool you paste it into. Fi…

🧹 Remove Duplicate Lines

Duplicates inflate your keyword counts, waste your tool credits and make every report wrong. Paste the list a…

Stop fixing lists by hand

The Fix Garbled Text (Mojibake) tool is one of the free tools inside Seowolf’s Notepad. Paste a list once, then dedupe, filter, sort, compare and format it in seconds — every step undoable, nothing uploaded, no account.

Open the Notepad — it’s free
← Browse all free tools
KnownHost