Character Encoding Detection
When decoded Base64 text shows broken letters such as “é” or “при”, the text was written in a different character set. This tool decodes the bytes with every supported charset and ranks the results by how natural they look—especially useful for European Latin-1, Windows-1252 and ISO-8859-2 data.
| Charset | Score | Decoded text (preview) |
|---|
Typical mojibake patterns
| You see | Real encoding | Displayed as |
|---|---|---|
é, ü, ’ | UTF-8 | Windows-1252 / ISO-8859-1 |
привет | UTF-8 (Russian) | Windows-1252 |
ïðèâåò | Windows-1251 | Windows-1252 |
� replacement characters | Legacy charset | UTF-8 |
Frequently asked questions
Why do I see "é" instead of "é"?
UTF-8 bytes are being displayed as Windows-1252/ISO-8859-1. Decode the same bytes as UTF-8 to get the correct text.
Which charset should I use for European text?
Prefer UTF-8 for new systems. For legacy Western Europe data try Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1; for Central Europe (PL, CZ, HU, SK) try ISO-8859-2.
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