File Encoding Converter

About File Encoding Converter

You open a file and instead of words you see Café, 버그, 文字化ã or a row of question marks. The text is not damaged — it is being read with the wrong encoding. This tool reads it with the right one and saves it again as UTF-8, so every program after that shows it correctly.

This is the job that chcp does in the Windows command window, and *Save as → Encoding* does in Notepad. Here it takes two clicks, and the file stays on your device — the decoding is done by your browser.

Two common problems it fixes

• A file from an old program — a CSV, a subtitle file or a .txt saved in your country's old code page (Windows-1252, EUC-KR, Shift_JIS, GBK, Big5, Windows-1251…). Pick that code page under Read the file as, then save as UTF-8.
• Mojibake — text that is already Unicode but shows é where é should be, because UTF-8 bytes were read as Windows-1252 somewhere along the way. Tick Repair and it is put back together.

What you can do with it

• Convert ANSI to UTF-8 so a file opens correctly everywhere
• Add a UTF-8 BOM so Excel stops mangling accents when it opens your CSV
• Remove a BOM that is upsetting a program or a web page
• Fix a subtitle file (.srt, .vtt) whose accents or Hangul come out as symbols
• Convert Korean EUC-KR, Japanese Shift_JIS, Chinese GBK or Big5 files to UTF-8
• Change line endings between Windows (CRLF) and Mac/Linux (LF) at the same time

Features

• Automatic detection — BOM, UTF-16 and valid UTF-8 are spotted for you, and the guess is shown
• Over 20 encodings to read from — UTF-8, UTF-16 LE/BE, the Windows-125x family, ISO-8859, EUC-KR, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, GBK, GB18030, Big5, KOI8-R and Mac Roman
• Six ways to save — UTF-8, UTF-8 with BOM, UTF-16 LE, UTF-16 BE, Windows-1252 and ISO-8859-1
• Mojibake repair for the classic UTF-8-read-as-1252 case
• Line ending control — keep, CRLF or LF
• Live preview so you can see it is right before you download
• A warning if characters would be lost when you save to a small code page
• Paste mode for a snippet of broken text, when you have no file
• 100% in your browser — nothing is uploaded

How sure is the detection? Why is there a "Read the file as" box?

A plain text file is only bytes — it does not record its own encoding anywhere. That is

why HTML needs <meta charset> and email needs a charset= header: without them, the

encoding has to be worked out from the bytes.

And the same bytes are legal in many encodings. The two bytes B0 A1 are valid in all of these:

| Read as | You get |

|---|---|

| EUC-KR | 가 |

| GB18030 | 啊 |

| Big5 | 陛 |

| Windows-1252 | °¡ |

| Windows-1251 | °Ў |

Strict checking does not settle it either — real Korean text decodes without any error as

Shift_JIS, Big5, GB18030 and Windows-1251 as well. So the tool judges the *result*: it decodes

with every candidate and keeps the one that produces one coherent script with a sensible

proportion of non-English characters.

What that means in practice:

• UTF-8, UTF-16 and any file with a BOM — identified with certainty.
• Plain English text — certain, and every encoding here reads it identically.
• An old code page — the tool names the most likely one and shows the close runners-up as

buttons you can click. Korean, Japanese and Cyrillic are usually pinned down exactly.

• Simplified vs Traditional Chinese vs Japanese Kanji, and Windows-1252 vs 1258, can be

genuinely indistinguishable — the byte patterns overlap. That is when you use

Read the file as and let the preview decide.

The box is a fallback, not a step. Leave it on Detect for me unless the preview looks wrong.

Why did my file not change?

This is the most common surprise, and it is not a fault. If your text uses only

plain English letters, digits and punctuation (what is called ASCII), then UTF-8,

Windows-1252 and ISO-8859-1 all store it with exactly the same bytes. There is

nothing to convert, so the saved file is identical and any checker still reports UTF-8.

The tool now tells you when this happens. If you need the bytes to genuinely differ, pick

UTF-16 LE / BE, or UTF-8 with BOM — those always change the file. The encodings only

start to differ once your text contains accents, Hangul, Kanji, Cyrillic or other

non-English characters.

How to use it

• Drop your text file in — the tool guesses the encoding and shows you the text
• Look at the preview. If it reads correctly, you are done; if not, change Read the file as to the code page your file came from, or tick Repair for é style damage
• Choose what to save as — UTF-8 (no BOM) is the right answer almost every time. Use UTF-8 with BOM if the file is a CSV you will open in Excel
• (Optional) set the line endings you want
• Press Download to save the fixed file. The encoding is put in the file name — notes-ANSI-1252-AppAndTools.txt, notes-UTF-8-AppAndTools.txt — so if you save the same file in two encodings you can always tell them apart