Mojibake
Encyclopedia
, from the Japanese 文字 (moji) "character" + 化け (bake) "change", is the occurrence of incorrect, unreadable characters shown when computer software
fails to render text correctly according to its associated character encoding
.
is not correctly tagged in a document, or when a document is moved to a system with a different default encoding. Such incorrect display occurs when writing system
s or character encoding
s are mistagged or "foreign" to the user's computer system: if a computer does not have the software required to process a foreign language's characters, it will attempt to process them in its default language encoding, usually resulting in gibberish. Messages transferred between different encodings of the same language can also have mojibake problems. Japanese language users, with several different encodings historically employed, encounter this problem relatively often. For example, the intended word "文字化け", encoded in UTF-8
, is incorrectly displayed as "æ–‡å—化ã‘" in software that is configured to expect text in the Windows-1252
or ISO-8859-1 encodings, usually labelled Western.
A web browser
may not be able to distinguish a page coded in EUC-JP and another in Shift-JIS
if the coding scheme is not assigned explicitly using HTTP headers sent along with the documents, or using the HTML
document's meta tags that are used to substitute for missing HTTP headers if the server cannot be configured to send the proper HTTP headers; see character encodings in HTML
. Heuristics can be applied to guess at the character set, but these are not always successful.
In the mid 1990s, as this problem became common, several websites featured mojibake not as a problem to be tackled but simply for amusement. Words and even sentences were "deciphered" with meanings made up to deliver funny messages.
Mojibake can also occur between what appears to be the same encodings. For example, some software by Microsoft
and Eudora
for Windows
purportedly encoded their output using the ISO-8859-1 encoding while, in reality, used Windows-1252
that contains extra printable characters in the C1 range. These characters were not displayed properly in software complying with the ISO standard; this especially affected software running under other operating systems (e.g. Unix
).
as a default encoding may achieve a greater degree of interoperability due to its widespread use and backwards compatibility with US-ASCII.
The difficulty of resolving an instance of mojibake varies depending on the application within which it occurs and the causes of it. Two of the most common applications in which mojibake may occur are web browser
s and word processor
s. Modern browsers and word processors often support a wide array of character encodings. Browsers often allow a user to change their rendering engine's
encoding setting on the fly, while word processors allow the user to select the appropriate encoding when opening a file. It may take some trial and error
for users to find the correct encoding.
The problem gets more complicated when it occurs in an application that normally does not support a wide range of character encoding, such as in a non-Unicode computer game. In this case, the user must change the operating system's encoding settings to match that of the game. However, changing the system-wide encoding settings can also cause Mojibake in pre-existing applications. In Windows XP
or later, a user also has the option to use Microsoft AppLocale, an application that allows the changing of per-application locale settings. Even so, changing the operating system encoding settings is not possible on earlier operating systems such as Windows 98
; to resolve this issue on earlier operating systems, a user would have to use third party font rendering applications.
brand 8-bit
computers used PETSCII
encoding, particularly notable for inverting the upper and lower case compared to standard ASCII
. PETSCII printers worked fine on other computers of the era, but flipped the case of all letters.
In German
, Buchstabensalat (letter salad) and Krähenfüße (crow's feet) are common terms for this phenomenon.
Another affected language is Arabic
(see below).
on the encoding of the English alphabet
. For example, the pound sign "£" will appear as "£" if it was encoded by the sender as UTF-8
but interpreted by the recipient as CP1252 or ISO 8859-1. If iterated, this can lead to "£", "£", etc.
, the phenomenon is, as mentioned, called mojibake . It is often encountered by non-Japanese when attempting to run software written for the Japanese market.
and Eastern Europe
an languages can also be affected. Because most computers were not connected to any network during the mid- to late-1980s, there were different character encodings for every language with diacritic
al characters.
, which was and remains complicated by several systems for encoding Cyrillic. The Soviet Union
and early Russian Federation developed KOI encodings
(Kod Obmena Informatsiey, Код Обмена Информацией which translates to "Code for Information Exchange"). This began with Cyrillic-only 7-bit KOI7
, based on ASCII
but with Latin and some other characters replaced with Cyrillic letters. Then came 8-bit KOI8 encoding that is an ASCII extension
which encodes Cyrillic letters only with high-bit set octets corresponding to 7-bit codes from KOI7. That's why KOI8 text, even Russian, remains partially readable after stripping the eighth bit, which was considered as a major advantage in the age of 8BITMIME-unaware email systems. Eventually KOI8 gained different flavors for Russian/Bulgarian (KOI8-R
), Ukrainian (KOI8-U
), Belarusian
(KOI8-RU) and even Tajik (KOI8-T).
Meanwhile in the West, Code page 866
supported Ukrainian
and Belarusian
as well as Russian/Bulgarian
in MS-DOS
. For Microsoft Windows
, Code Page 1251
added support for Serbian
and other Slavic variants of Cyrillic. Most recently, Unicode includes special characters in Old Church Slavonic
and non-Slavic minority languages in the Russian Federation. Now Unicode endeavors to replace the confusion with a system whereby any of the world's written languages either displays correctly or tells you which font you need to install, however Unicode still doesn't react transparently to legacy KOI and Code Page encodings.
Before Unicode, it was necessary to match text encoding with a font using the same encoding system. Failure to do this produced unreadable gibberish whose specific appearance varied depending on the exact combination of text encoding and font encoding. Accented vowels were symptomatic of trying to view any Cyrillic encoding with a font limited to the Latin alphabet. In general, Cyrillic gibberish was symptomatic of using the wrong Cyrillic font. Unicode text in an environment that doesn't accommodate Unicode merely displays strings of question marks.
In Bulgarian
, mojibake is often called maymunitsa (маймуница), meaning monkey's alphabet. In Serbian
, it is called (đubre), meaning trash
. Unlike the former USSR, South Slavs never used something like KOI8, and Code Page 1251 was the dominant Cyrillic encoding there before Unicode. Therefore these languages experienced fewer encoding incompatibility troubles than Russian. In 1980s, Bulgarian computers used its own MIK encoding
, a bit similar (but incompatible with) CP866, though.
, every company selling early DOS
computers created its own encoding, and simply reprogrammed the EPROM
s of the video cards (typically CGA
, EGA
, or Hercules
) with the needed glyphs for Polish — arbitrarily located without reference to where other computer sellers had placed them. Additionally, users of then-popular home computers (such as the Atari ST
) invented their own encodings, incompatible with international standards (ISO 8859-2), vendor standards (IBM CP852, Windows CP1250
) and locally agreed-upon PC/MS DOS standards (Mazovia
). The situation began to improve when, after pressure from academic and user groups, ISO 8859-2 succeeded as the "Internet standard" with limited support of the dominant vendors' software (today largely replaced by Unicode). With the numerous problems caused by the variety of encodings, even today some users tend to refer to Polish diacritical characters as krzaczki[Ksha-Chkee] ("bushes").
and Swedish
use the letters of the English alphabet
and three more characters: å, ä and ö, and typically these three are the only ones that become corrupted. The situation is similar for Norwegian and Danish, except the three affected letters are æ, ø and å, and German, where the affected letters are ä, ö, ü and ß. In Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and German, vowels are rarely repeated, and it is usually obvious when one character gets corrupted, such as the second letter in "kärlek" (kärlek, "love"). This way, even though the reader has to guess among å, ä and ö, almost all texts remain perfectly readable. However, Finnish
does have repeating vowels in words like "Hääyö" (hääyö, "wedding night"), which can sometimes render text very hard to read. Icelandic
is worse off, with ten possibly confounding characters: á
, ð
, é
, í
, ó
, ú
, ý
, þ, æ
and ö
.
", may be misinterpreted.
(Croatian
, Bosnian
, Serbian
) add to the basic Latin alphabet the letters š, đ, č, ć, ž, and their capital counterparts Š, Đ, Č, Ć, Ž. All of these letters are defined in Latin-2
and Windows-1250
, while only some (š, Š, ž, Ž, Đ) exist in the usual OS-default Western
, and are there because of some other languages.
Although even those that exist in extended Western ASCII (Windows-1252) are not immune to errors, the ones that don't are much more prone to errors. Thus, even nowadays, "šđčćž ŠĐČĆŽ" is all too often interpreted as "šðèæž ŠÐÈÆŽ", making the users wonder where ð, è, æ, È, Æ are used.
When confined to basic ASCII (most user names, for example), common replacements are: š→s, đ→dj, č→c, ć→c, ž→z (capital forms analogously, with Đ→Dj or Đ→DJ depending on word case). All of these replacements introduce ambiguities, so reconstructing the original from such a form is usually done manually if required.
Importance of Windows-1252
encoding is high because English versions of operating systems are most widespread, not the localized ones. The reasons for this are
The drive of differentiating Croatian from Serbian, Bosnian from Croatian and Serbian, and now even Montenegrin
(a Serbian dialect that was dominant in former Yugoslavia) from the other three creates many problems. There are many different localizations, using different standards, and of different quality. There are no common translations for vast computer terminology originating in English. In the end, people use adopted English words (kompjuter-computer, kompajlirati-compile, etc.), and if they are unaccustomed to the translated terms may not understand what some option in a menu is supposed to do based on the translated phrase. Therefore, the people who understand English, as well as those who are accustomed to English terminology (which are most, because English terminology is also mostly taught in schools due to these problems) regularly choose the original English versions of non-specialist software.
When Cyrillic script is used (for Macedonian
and partially Serbian language), the problem indeed is similar to other Cyrillic-based scripts.
Newer versions of English Windows allow ANSI codepage to be changed (older versions like Win95 require special English versions with this support), but this setting can and often were incorrectly set (for example, Windows 98/Me can be set to most non-RTL SBCS codepages including 1250, but only at install time).
is another affected language, which uses the 26 basic English characters, plus the accented forms á, é, í, ó, ú, ö, ü (all present in the Latin-1 character set), plus the 2 characters ő
and ű
, which are not in Latin-1. These 2 characters can be correctly encoded in Latin-2, Windows-1250 and Unicode. Before Unicode became common in e-mail clients, e-mails containing Hungarian text often had the letters ő and ű corrupted, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability. It is common to respond to an e-mail rendered unreadable by character mangling (referred to as "betűszemét", meaning "garbage lettering") with the phrase "Árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép", a nonsense phrase (literally "Flood-resistant mirror-drilling machine") containing all accented characters used in Hungarian.
A particularly notable example of this is the old Wikipedia logo
, which attempts to show the character analogous to "w" or "wi" (the first letter or syllable of "Wikipedia") on each of many puzzle pieces. Instead, the puzzle piece meant to bear the Devanagari
character for "wi" used to show a somewhat nonsensical scribble with a dangling line at the end, easily recognizable as mojibake generated by a computer not configured to display Indic text. That this occurred in the venerable front-page logo and has never been corrected over many years has been seen as humorously emblematic of Wikipedia's alleged accuracy and reliability problems. The recently redesigned logo has fixed these errors.
Some Indic and Indic-derived scripts, most notably Lao, were not officially supported by Windows XP
until the release of Vista
. However, various sites have made free-to-download fonts.
, acute accents on the five vowels (á
, é
, í
, ó
, ú
), and rarely ü
. Ñ
and the accented vowels are regularly corrupted, since they are not available in ASCII
.
Computer software
Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....
fails to render text correctly according to its associated character encoding
Character encoding
A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...
.
Causes
Mojibake is often caused when a character encodingCharacter encoding
A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...
is not correctly tagged in a document, or when a document is moved to a system with a different default encoding. Such incorrect display occurs when writing system
Writing system
A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
s or character encoding
Character encoding
A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...
s are mistagged or "foreign" to the user's computer system: if a computer does not have the software required to process a foreign language's characters, it will attempt to process them in its default language encoding, usually resulting in gibberish. Messages transferred between different encodings of the same language can also have mojibake problems. Japanese language users, with several different encodings historically employed, encounter this problem relatively often. For example, the intended word "文字化け", encoded in UTF-8
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
, is incorrectly displayed as "æ–‡å—化ã‘" in software that is configured to expect text in the Windows-1252
Windows-1252
Windows-1252 or CP-1252 is a character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows in English and some other Western languages. It is one version within the group of Windows code pages...
or ISO-8859-1 encodings, usually labelled Western.
A web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
may not be able to distinguish a page coded in EUC-JP and another in Shift-JIS
Shift-JIS
Shift JIS is a character encoding for the Japanese language originally developed by a Japanese company called ASCII Corporation in conjunction with Microsoft and standardized as JIS X 0208 Appendix 1...
if the coding scheme is not assigned explicitly using HTTP headers sent along with the documents, or using the HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
document's meta tags that are used to substitute for missing HTTP headers if the server cannot be configured to send the proper HTTP headers; see character encodings in HTML
Character encodings in HTML
HTML has been in use since 1991, but HTML 4.0 was the first standardized version where international characters were given reasonably complete treatment...
. Heuristics can be applied to guess at the character set, but these are not always successful.
In the mid 1990s, as this problem became common, several websites featured mojibake not as a problem to be tackled but simply for amusement. Words and even sentences were "deciphered" with meanings made up to deliver funny messages.
Mojibake can also occur between what appears to be the same encodings. For example, some software by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
and Eudora
Eudora (e-mail client)
Eudora is an e-mail client used on the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also supports several palmtop computing platforms, including Newton and the Palm OS....
for Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
purportedly encoded their output using the ISO-8859-1 encoding while, in reality, used Windows-1252
Windows-1252
Windows-1252 or CP-1252 is a character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows in English and some other Western languages. It is one version within the group of Windows code pages...
that contains extra printable characters in the C1 range. These characters were not displayed properly in software complying with the ISO standard; this especially affected software running under other operating systems (e.g. Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
).
Resolutions
Applications using UTF-8UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
as a default encoding may achieve a greater degree of interoperability due to its widespread use and backwards compatibility with US-ASCII.
The difficulty of resolving an instance of mojibake varies depending on the application within which it occurs and the causes of it. Two of the most common applications in which mojibake may occur are web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
s and word processor
Word processor
A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
s. Modern browsers and word processors often support a wide array of character encodings. Browsers often allow a user to change their rendering engine's
Layout engine
A web browser engine, , is a software component that takes marked up content and formatting information and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer...
encoding setting on the fly, while word processors allow the user to select the appropriate encoding when opening a file. It may take some trial and error
Trial and error
Trial and error, or trial by error, is a general method of problem solving, fixing things, or for obtaining knowledge."Learning doesn't happen from failure itself but rather from analyzing the failure, making a change, and then trying again."...
for users to find the correct encoding.
The problem gets more complicated when it occurs in an application that normally does not support a wide range of character encoding, such as in a non-Unicode computer game. In this case, the user must change the operating system's encoding settings to match that of the game. However, changing the system-wide encoding settings can also cause Mojibake in pre-existing applications. In Windows XP
Windows XP
Windows XP is an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops and media centers. First released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, it is the second most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base...
or later, a user also has the option to use Microsoft AppLocale, an application that allows the changing of per-application locale settings. Even so, changing the operating system encoding settings is not possible on earlier operating systems such as Windows 98
Windows 98
Windows 98 is a graphical operating system by Microsoft. It is the second major release in the Windows 9x line of operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on 15 May 1998 and to retail on 25 June 1998. Windows 98 is the successor to Windows 95. Like its predecessor, it is a hybrid...
; to resolve this issue on earlier operating systems, a user would have to use third party font rendering applications.
Problems in specific languages
CommodoreCommodore International
Commodore is the commonly used name for Commodore Business Machines , the U.S.-based home computer manufacturer and electronics manufacturer headquartered in West Chester, Pennsylvania, which also housed Commodore's corporate parent company, Commodore International Limited...
brand 8-bit
8-bit
The first widely adopted 8-bit microprocessor was the Intel 8080, being used in many hobbyist computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s, often running the CP/M operating system. The Zilog Z80 and the Motorola 6800 were also used in similar computers...
computers used PETSCII
PETSCII
PETSCII , also known as CBM ASCII, is the variation of the ASCII character set used in Commodore Business Machines 's 8-bit home computers, starting with the PET from 1977 and including the VIC-20, C64, CBM-II, Plus/4, C16, C116 and C128...
encoding, particularly notable for inverting the upper and lower case compared to standard ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
. PETSCII printers worked fine on other computers of the era, but flipped the case of all letters.
In German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Buchstabensalat (letter salad) and Krähenfüße (crow's feet) are common terms for this phenomenon.
Another affected language is Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
(see below).
English
Mojibake in English texts generally occurs in punctuation, such as em dashes (—), en dashes (–), and curly quotes (“, ”), but rarely in character text, since most encodings agree with ASCIIASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
on the encoding of the English alphabet
English alphabet
The modern English alphabet is a Latin alphabet consisting of 26 letters and 2 ligatures – the same letters that are found in the Basic modern Latin alphabet:...
. For example, the pound sign "£" will appear as "£" if it was encoded by the sender as UTF-8
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
but interpreted by the recipient as CP1252 or ISO 8859-1. If iterated, this can lead to "£", "£", etc.
Japanese
In JapaneseJapanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, the phenomenon is, as mentioned, called mojibake . It is often encountered by non-Japanese when attempting to run software written for the Japanese market.
Central Europe
Users of CentralCentral Europe
Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...
and Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
an languages can also be affected. Because most computers were not connected to any network during the mid- to late-1980s, there were different character encodings for every language with diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
al characters.
Russian and other Cyrillic-based scripts
Mojibake may be called krakozyabry (кракозя́бры) in RussianRussian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, which was and remains complicated by several systems for encoding Cyrillic. The Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
and early Russian Federation developed KOI encodings
KOI character encodings
KOI is a family of several code pages for the Cyrillic alphabet.The name stands for Kod Obmena Informatsiey which means "Code for Information Exchange"....
(Kod Obmena Informatsiey, Код Обмена Информацией which translates to "Code for Information Exchange"). This began with Cyrillic-only 7-bit KOI7
KOI7
KOI7 is a 7-bit character encoding, designed to cover Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet.In Russian, KOI7 stands for Kod Obmena Informatsiey, 7 bit which means "Code for Information Exchange, 7 bit"....
, based on ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
but with Latin and some other characters replaced with Cyrillic letters. Then came 8-bit KOI8 encoding that is an ASCII extension
Extended ASCII
The term extended ASCII describes eight-bit or larger character encodings that include the standard seven-bit ASCII characters as well as others...
which encodes Cyrillic letters only with high-bit set octets corresponding to 7-bit codes from KOI7. That's why KOI8 text, even Russian, remains partially readable after stripping the eighth bit, which was considered as a major advantage in the age of 8BITMIME-unaware email systems. Eventually KOI8 gained different flavors for Russian/Bulgarian (KOI8-R
KOI8-R
KOI8-R is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It also happens to cover Bulgarian, but is not used since CP1251 is accepted. A derivative encoding is KOI8-U, which adds Ukrainian characters...
), Ukrainian (KOI8-U
KOI8-U
KOI8-U is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Ukrainian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on KOI8-R, which covers Russian and Bulgarian, but replaces eight graphic characters with four Ukrainian letters Ґ, Є, І, and Ї in both upper case and lower case.In Microsoft Windows,...
), Belarusian
Belarusian alphabet
The Belarusian alphabet is based on the Cyrillic script and is derived from the alphabet of the Old Church Slavonic language. The alphabet has existed in its modern form since 1918 and consists of thirty-two letters...
(KOI8-RU) and even Tajik (KOI8-T).
Meanwhile in the West, Code page 866
Code page 866
Code page 866 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. It is based on the "alternative character set" of GOST 19768-87...
supported Ukrainian
Ukrainian language
Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....
and Belarusian
Belarusian language
The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...
as well as Russian/Bulgarian
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
in MS-DOS
MS-DOS
MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...
. For Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
, Code Page 1251
Windows-1251
Windows-1251 is a popular 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet such as Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian Cyrillic and other languages...
added support for Serbian
Serbian Cyrillic alphabet
The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet is an adaptation of the Cyrillic script for the Serbian language, developed in 1818 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić. It is one of the two standard modern alphabets used to write the Serbian language, the other being Latin...
and other Slavic variants of Cyrillic. Most recently, Unicode includes special characters in Old Church Slavonic
Early Cyrillic alphabet
The Early Cyrillic alphabet is a writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the 9th or 10th century to write the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language...
and non-Slavic minority languages in the Russian Federation. Now Unicode endeavors to replace the confusion with a system whereby any of the world's written languages either displays correctly or tells you which font you need to install, however Unicode still doesn't react transparently to legacy KOI and Code Page encodings.
Before Unicode, it was necessary to match text encoding with a font using the same encoding system. Failure to do this produced unreadable gibberish whose specific appearance varied depending on the exact combination of text encoding and font encoding. Accented vowels were symptomatic of trying to view any Cyrillic encoding with a font limited to the Latin alphabet. In general, Cyrillic gibberish was symptomatic of using the wrong Cyrillic font. Unicode text in an environment that doesn't accommodate Unicode merely displays strings of question marks.
In Bulgarian
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
, mojibake is often called maymunitsa (маймуница), meaning monkey's alphabet. In Serbian
Serbian language
Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....
, it is called (đubre), meaning trash
Waste
Waste is unwanted or useless materials. In biology, waste is any of the many unwanted substances or toxins that are expelled from living organisms, metabolic waste; such as urea, sweat or feces. Litter is waste which has been disposed of improperly...
. Unlike the former USSR, South Slavs never used something like KOI8, and Code Page 1251 was the dominant Cyrillic encoding there before Unicode. Therefore these languages experienced fewer encoding incompatibility troubles than Russian. In 1980s, Bulgarian computers used its own MIK encoding
MIK Code page
MIK is a Cyrillic code page used with MS-DOS. It is based on the character set used in the Bulgarian IBM PC compatible system.This is the most widespread DOS/OEM code page used in Bulgaria, rather than CP 855, CP 866 or CP 872....
, a bit similar (but incompatible with) CP866, though.
Polish
In PolandPoland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
, every company selling early DOS
DOS
DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...
computers created its own encoding, and simply reprogrammed the EPROM
EPROM
An EPROM , or erasable programmable read only memory, is a type of memory chip that retains its data when its power supply is switched off. In other words, it is non-volatile. It is an array of floating-gate transistors individually programmed by an electronic device that supplies higher voltages...
s of the video cards (typically CGA
Color Graphics Adapter
The Color Graphics Adapter , originally also called the Color/Graphics Adapter or IBM Color/Graphics Monitor Adapter, introduced in 1981, was IBM's first color graphics card, and the first color computer display standard for the IBM PC....
, EGA
Enhanced Graphics Adapter
The Enhanced Graphics Adapter is the IBM PC computer display standard specification which is between CGA and VGA in terms of color and space resolution. Introduced in October 1984 by IBM shortly after its new PC/AT, EGA produces a display of 16 simultaneous colors from a palette of 64 at a...
, or Hercules
Hercules Graphics Card
The Hercules Graphics Card was a computer graphics controller made by Hercules Computer Technology, Inc. which, through its popularity, became a widely supported display standard. It was common on IBM PC compatibles connected to a monochrome monitor . It supported one high resolution text mode and...
) with the needed glyphs for Polish — arbitrarily located without reference to where other computer sellers had placed them. Additionally, users of then-popular home computers (such as the Atari ST
Atari ST
The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals...
) invented their own encodings, incompatible with international standards (ISO 8859-2), vendor standards (IBM CP852, Windows CP1250
Windows-1250
Windows-1250 is a code page used under Microsoft Windows to represent texts in Central European and Eastern European languages that use Latin script, such as Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovene, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian , Romanian and Albanian...
) and locally agreed-upon PC/MS DOS standards (Mazovia
Mazovia encoding
Mazovia encoding is used under MS-DOS to represent Polish texts. Basically it is code page 437 with some positions filled with Polish letters.-Code page layout:Each character is shown with its equivalent Unicode code point and its decimal code point...
). The situation began to improve when, after pressure from academic and user groups, ISO 8859-2 succeeded as the "Internet standard" with limited support of the dominant vendors' software (today largely replaced by Unicode). With the numerous problems caused by the variety of encodings, even today some users tend to refer to Polish diacritical characters as krzaczki[Ksha-Chkee] ("bushes").
Nordic languages and German
Among the Nordic languages, mojibake is not uncommon, but is more of an annoyance than a problem. FinnishFinnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
and Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
use the letters of the English alphabet
English alphabet
The modern English alphabet is a Latin alphabet consisting of 26 letters and 2 ligatures – the same letters that are found in the Basic modern Latin alphabet:...
and three more characters: å, ä and ö, and typically these three are the only ones that become corrupted. The situation is similar for Norwegian and Danish, except the three affected letters are æ, ø and å, and German, where the affected letters are ä, ö, ü and ß. In Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and German, vowels are rarely repeated, and it is usually obvious when one character gets corrupted, such as the second letter in "kärlek" (kärlek, "love"). This way, even though the reader has to guess among å, ä and ö, almost all texts remain perfectly readable. However, Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
does have repeating vowels in words like "Hääyö" (hääyö, "wedding night"), which can sometimes render text very hard to read. Icelandic
Icelandic language
Icelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...
is worse off, with ten possibly confounding characters: á
Á
is a letter of the Czech, Faroese, Hungarian, Icelandic, Slovak and Sámi languages. This letter also appears in Dutch, Galician, Irish, Occitan, Portuguese, Spanish, Lakota, Navajo, and Vietnamese as a variant of the letter “a”. Some writers use á incorrectly to denote a quantity, often used on...
, ð
Ð
A Latin capital letter D with a stroke through its vertical bar is the uppercase form of several different letters:*D with stroke , used in Vietnamese, some South Slavic , Moro and Sami languages...
, é
É
is a letter of the Czech, Hungarian, Icelandic, Kashubian, Luxembourgish, Slovak, and Catalan, Danish, English, French, Galician, Irish, Italian, Occitan, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese language as a variant of the letter “e”...
, í
Í
is a letter in the Faroese, Hungarian, Icelandic, Czech, Slovak, and Tatar languages. This letter also appears in Catalan, Irish, Occitan, Portuguese, Spanish, Galician, Leonese, Navajo, and Vietnamese language as a variant of letter “i”....
, ó
Ó
is a letter in the Faroese, Hungarian, Icelandic, Kashubian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian languages. This letter also appears in the Catalan, Irish, Occitan, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Vietnamese languages as a variant of letter “o”. It is also used in English for other purposes...
, ú
Ú
Ú or ú is a Latin letter used in the Czech, Faroese, Hungarian, Icelandic, and Slovak writing systems. This letter also appears in Dutch, Irish, Occitan, Pinyin, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Vietnamese as a variant of the letter "U"....
, ý
Y
Y is the twenty-fifth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet and represents either a vowel or a consonant in English.-Name:In Latin, Y was named Y Graeca "Greek Y". This was pronounced as I Graeca "Greek I", since Latin speakers had trouble pronouncing , which was not a native sound...
, þ, æ
Æ
Æ is a grapheme formed from the letters a and e. Originally a ligature representing a Latin diphthong, it has been promoted to the full status of a letter in the alphabets of some languages, including Danish, Faroese, Norwegian and Icelandic...
and ö
Ö
"Ö", or "ö", is a character used in several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter O with umlaut to denote the front vowels or . In languages without umlaut, the character is also used as a "O with diaeresis" to denote a syllable break, wherein its pronunciation remains an unmodified .- O-Umlaut...
.
Asian encodings
Another type of mojibake occurs when text is erroneously parsed in a multi-byte encoding, such as one of the east Asian encodings. With this kind of mojibake more than one (typically two) characters are corrupted at once, e.g. "k舐lek" (kärlek) in Swedish, where "är" is parsed as "舐". Compared to the above mojibake, this is harder to read, since letters unrelated to the problematic å, ä or ö are missing, and is especially problematic for short words starting with å, ä or ö such as "än" (which becomes "舅"). Since two letters are combined, the mojibake also seems more random (over 50 variants compared to the normal three, not counting the rarer capitals). In some rare cases, an entire text string which happens to include a pattern of particular word lengths, such as the sentence "Bush hid the factsBush hid the facts
Bush hid the facts is a common name for a bug present in the function IsTextUnicode of Microsoft Windows, which causes a file of text encoded in Windows-1252 or similar encoding to be interpreted as if it were UTF-16LE, resulting in mojibake...
", may be misinterpreted.
Countries of the former Yugoslavia
Slavic languages of former YugoslaviaSocialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the Yugoslav state that existed from the abolition of the Yugoslav monarchy until it was dissolved in 1992 amid the Yugoslav Wars. It was a socialist state and a federation made up of six socialist republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia,...
(Croatian
Croatian language
Croatian is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighbouring countries...
, Bosnian
Bosnian language
Bosnian is a South Slavic language, spoken by Bosniaks. As a standardized form of the Shtokavian dialect, it is one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina....
, Serbian
Serbian language
Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....
) add to the basic Latin alphabet the letters š, đ, č, ć, ž, and their capital counterparts Š, Đ, Č, Ć, Ž. All of these letters are defined in Latin-2
ISO/IEC 8859-2
ISO/IEC 8859-2:1999, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 2: Latin alphabet No. 2, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. It is informally referred to as "Latin-2". It is generally...
and Windows-1250
Windows-1250
Windows-1250 is a code page used under Microsoft Windows to represent texts in Central European and Eastern European languages that use Latin script, such as Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovene, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian , Romanian and Albanian...
, while only some (š, Š, ž, Ž, Đ) exist in the usual OS-default Western
Windows-1252
Windows-1252 or CP-1252 is a character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows in English and some other Western languages. It is one version within the group of Windows code pages...
, and are there because of some other languages.
Although even those that exist in extended Western ASCII (Windows-1252) are not immune to errors, the ones that don't are much more prone to errors. Thus, even nowadays, "šđčćž ŠĐČĆŽ" is all too often interpreted as "šðèæž ŠÐÈÆŽ", making the users wonder where ð, è, æ, È, Æ are used.
When confined to basic ASCII (most user names, for example), common replacements are: š→s, đ→dj, č→c, ć→c, ž→z (capital forms analogously, with Đ→Dj or Đ→DJ depending on word case). All of these replacements introduce ambiguities, so reconstructing the original from such a form is usually done manually if required.
Importance of Windows-1252
Windows-1252
Windows-1252 or CP-1252 is a character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows in English and some other Western languages. It is one version within the group of Windows code pages...
encoding is high because English versions of operating systems are most widespread, not the localized ones. The reasons for this are
- Relatively small and fragmented market, increasing price of high quality localization.
- High degree of software piracy (in turn caused by high price of software compared to income), thus discouraging localization efforts.
- People prefer English version of OS and other software.
The drive of differentiating Croatian from Serbian, Bosnian from Croatian and Serbian, and now even Montenegrin
Montenegrin alphabet
The Montenegrin alphabet is the collective name given to "Abeceda" and "Азбука" writing systems used to write the Montenegrin language. It was adopted on 9 June 2009 by the minister of education of Montenegro, Sreten Škuletić and replaced the Serbian Cyrillic and Croatian Latin alphabets...
(a Serbian dialect that was dominant in former Yugoslavia) from the other three creates many problems. There are many different localizations, using different standards, and of different quality. There are no common translations for vast computer terminology originating in English. In the end, people use adopted English words (kompjuter-computer, kompajlirati-compile, etc.), and if they are unaccustomed to the translated terms may not understand what some option in a menu is supposed to do based on the translated phrase. Therefore, the people who understand English, as well as those who are accustomed to English terminology (which are most, because English terminology is also mostly taught in schools due to these problems) regularly choose the original English versions of non-specialist software.
When Cyrillic script is used (for Macedonian
Macedonian language
Macedonian is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by approximately 2–3 million people principally in the region of Macedonia but also in the Macedonian diaspora...
and partially Serbian language), the problem indeed is similar to other Cyrillic-based scripts.
Newer versions of English Windows allow ANSI codepage to be changed (older versions like Win95 require special English versions with this support), but this setting can and often were incorrectly set (for example, Windows 98/Me can be set to most non-RTL SBCS codepages including 1250, but only at install time).
Hungarian
HungarianHungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
is another affected language, which uses the 26 basic English characters, plus the accented forms á, é, í, ó, ú, ö, ü (all present in the Latin-1 character set), plus the 2 characters ő
O
O is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a...
and ű
U
U is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details....
, which are not in Latin-1. These 2 characters can be correctly encoded in Latin-2, Windows-1250 and Unicode. Before Unicode became common in e-mail clients, e-mails containing Hungarian text often had the letters ő and ű corrupted, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability. It is common to respond to an e-mail rendered unreadable by character mangling (referred to as "betűszemét", meaning "garbage lettering") with the phrase "Árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép", a nonsense phrase (literally "Flood-resistant mirror-drilling machine") containing all accented characters used in Hungarian.
Indic text
A similar effect can occur in Indic text, even if the character set used is properly recognized by the application. This is because, in many Indic scripts, the rules by which individual letter symbols combine to create symbols for syllables may not be properly understood by a computer missing the appropriate software, even if the glyphs for the individual letter forms are available.A particularly notable example of this is the old Wikipedia logo
Logo of Wikipedia
The logo of Wikipedia, an Internet-based free multilingual encyclopedia, is an unfinished globe constructed from jigsaw pieces—some pieces are still missing at the top—inscribed with glyphs from many different writing systems...
, which attempts to show the character analogous to "w" or "wi" (the first letter or syllable of "Wikipedia") on each of many puzzle pieces. Instead, the puzzle piece meant to bear the Devanagari
Devanagari
Devanagari |deva]]" and "nāgarī" ), also called Nagari , is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal...
character for "wi" used to show a somewhat nonsensical scribble with a dangling line at the end, easily recognizable as mojibake generated by a computer not configured to display Indic text. That this occurred in the venerable front-page logo and has never been corrected over many years has been seen as humorously emblematic of Wikipedia's alleged accuracy and reliability problems. The recently redesigned logo has fixed these errors.
Some Indic and Indic-derived scripts, most notably Lao, were not officially supported by Windows XP
Windows XP
Windows XP is an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops and media centers. First released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, it is the second most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base...
until the release of Vista
Windows Vista
Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...
. However, various sites have made free-to-download fonts.
Spanish
Spanish is another affected language. It is known as deformación (literally deformation). Its problems with Mojibake are similar to Nordic languages. Spanish uses all 26 Latin letters, ñÑ
Ñ is a letter of the modern Latin alphabet, formed by an N with a diacritical tilde. It is used in the Spanish alphabet, Galician alphabet, Asturian alphabet, Basque alphabet, Aragonese old alphabet , Filipino alphabet, Chamorro alphabet and the Guarani alphabet, where it represents...
, acute accents on the five vowels (á
Á
is a letter of the Czech, Faroese, Hungarian, Icelandic, Slovak and Sámi languages. This letter also appears in Dutch, Galician, Irish, Occitan, Portuguese, Spanish, Lakota, Navajo, and Vietnamese as a variant of the letter “a”. Some writers use á incorrectly to denote a quantity, often used on...
, é
É
is a letter of the Czech, Hungarian, Icelandic, Kashubian, Luxembourgish, Slovak, and Catalan, Danish, English, French, Galician, Irish, Italian, Occitan, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese language as a variant of the letter “e”...
, í
Í
is a letter in the Faroese, Hungarian, Icelandic, Czech, Slovak, and Tatar languages. This letter also appears in Catalan, Irish, Occitan, Portuguese, Spanish, Galician, Leonese, Navajo, and Vietnamese language as a variant of letter “i”....
, ó
Ó
is a letter in the Faroese, Hungarian, Icelandic, Kashubian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian languages. This letter also appears in the Catalan, Irish, Occitan, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Vietnamese languages as a variant of letter “o”. It is also used in English for other purposes...
, ú
Ú
Ú or ú is a Latin letter used in the Czech, Faroese, Hungarian, Icelandic, and Slovak writing systems. This letter also appears in Dutch, Irish, Occitan, Pinyin, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Vietnamese as a variant of the letter "U"....
), and rarely ü
Ü
Ü, or ü, is a character which can be either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter U with an umlaut or a diaeresis...
. Ñ
Ñ
Ñ is a letter of the modern Latin alphabet, formed by an N with a diacritical tilde. It is used in the Spanish alphabet, Galician alphabet, Asturian alphabet, Basque alphabet, Aragonese old alphabet , Filipino alphabet, Chamorro alphabet and the Guarani alphabet, where it represents...
and the accented vowels are regularly corrupted, since they are not available in ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
.
Example
| Output encoding | Setting in browser | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Arabic example: | ||
| UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks... |
ISO 8859-1 | الإعلان العالمى Ù„Øقوق الإنسان |
| KOI8-R KOI8-R KOI8-R is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It also happens to cover Bulgarian, but is not used since CP1251 is accepted. A derivative encoding is KOI8-U, which adds Ukrainian characters... |
О╩©ь╖ы└ь╔ь╧ы└ь╖ы├ ь╖ы└ь╧ь╖ы└ы┘ы┴ ы└ь╜ы┌ы┬ы┌ ь╖ы└ь╔ы├ьЁь╖ы├ | |
| ISO 8859-5 | яЛПиЇй�иЅиЙй�иЇй� иЇй�иЙиЇй�й�й� й�ий�й�й� иЇй�иЅй�иГиЇй� | |
| CP 866 | я╗┐╪з┘Д╪е╪╣┘Д╪з┘Ж ╪з┘Д╪╣╪з┘Д┘Е┘Й ┘Д╪н┘В┘И┘В ╪з┘Д╪е┘Ж╪│╪з┘Ж | |
| ISO 8859-6 | ُ؛؟ظ�ع�ظ�ظ�ع�ظ�ع� ظ�ع�ظ�ظ�ع�ع�ع� ع�ظع�ع�ع� ظ�ع�ظ�ع�ظ�ظ�ع� | |
| ISO 8859-2 | اŮ�ŘĽŘšŮ�اŮ� اŮ�ؚاŮ�Ů�Ů� Ů�ŘŮ�Ů�Ů� اŮ�ŘĽŮ�ساŮ� | |
External links
- Reprinted article from the Japan Times
- Coldfusion Developers Guide article
- Online decoder of Hebrew text – Online decoder converts input into readable Hebrew text
- Translators guide
- Recovery tool – Recovery of Japanese text
- Chinese E-mail Fixer – Recovery of Chinese text
- Chinese Encoding Converter - Convert file encoding of text files
- Decodr.ru - Fast Cyrillic decoder of e-mail and charsets
- Universal Cyrillic decoder – Recovery of Cyrillic text
- Multilingual online text decoder – Online decoder converts scrambled input into readable text. Supported languages are Russian, Bulgarian, Greek, Hebrew and Thai.
- Noto pri ĉapeloj: Resuma tabelo – Covers most cases of Esperanto mojibake.
- Encoding Repair Kit – Fixes mojibake, originally intended for Japanese. Windows freeware, 1998. Not compatible with Windows Vista or 7.