Drop a CSV or paste text that shows “José”, “’” or “€”. The damage is detected and reversed cell by cell, correct text is left alone, and you download a clean UTF-8 file that Excel opens properly.
No file at hand?
Repairing a file usually means it holds names, addresses or customer data. Here everything happens in your browser, in a background thread; the file never leaves your device. You can check it in the Network tab of your browser's developer tools.
In UTF-8, the encoding used by almost every website and modern program, letters such as é, ñ or ü take two bytes, and symbols such as € or the curly apostrophe ’ take three. Older single-byte encodings such as Windows-1252 (“ANSI”) and Latin-1 use one byte per character. When UTF-8 bytes are read as Windows-1252, each byte becomes its own character: é (bytes C3 A9) appears as “é”, € (E2 82 AC) as “€” and ’ as “’”.
The most common trigger is Excel. A UTF-8 CSV without a byte order mark (BOM) opened by double-clicking is read with the computer's legacy code page. If someone then saves it, the garbled characters are written into the file as real UTF-8, and the damage is permanent until it is reversed. Do that twice and you get double encoding: é becomes “é”.
| You see | It should be | You see | It should be |
|---|---|---|---|
é | é | € | € |
è | è | ’ | ’ |
ñ | ñ | “ †| “ ” |
ü | ü | – | – |
ö | ö | ° | ° |
ç | ç |  | a non-breaking space |
ã | ã | é | é (double encoding) |
The tool looks for runs of characters that, turned back into Windows-1252 or Latin-1 bytes, form valid UTF-8. Each run is replaced by the character it encodes, and the process is repeated to undo double or triple encoding. A run is only replaced when the result is a plausible character: letters, punctuation, currency symbols or emoji. Rare scripts such as Cyrillic or Chinese are only accepted when several damaged characters appear together, as they do in real damaged text. That is why “São Paulo”, “Müller” or “CANCIÓN»” are never altered, and why a file that mixes repaired and correct rows comes out right.
Files that are simply in Windows-1252 or Latin-1, without damage, are decoded correctly and saved as UTF-8 with BOM. You can also choose the encoding by hand if the file comes from a Central European or Cyrillic system.
Once the file is clean, convert the CSV to Excel so the problem cannot come back, or keep IDs and postcodes safe with CSV to Excel without losing leading zeros. To export a workbook with the right encoding from the start, use Excel to CSV.
Yes. It is 100% free, with no usage limits, no account and no sign-up. There is no paid plan and no feature is locked.
No. The file or pasted text is repaired inside your browser. The page only downloads its own code and the open-source SheetJS library from this site; your data and file names are never sent anywhere. If you accept analytics cookies, Google Analytics receives anonymous usage data such as page views, never your data or file names.
The text was saved as UTF-8, where é takes two bytes, and then read as Windows-1252 or Latin-1, where each of those bytes is a separate character: Ã and ©. It usually happens when Excel opens a UTF-8 CSV that has no BOM. If that garbled text is saved again, the damage becomes part of the file, and this tool reverses it.
Yes. Double encoding turns é into é, and a third round makes it even longer. The repair is applied repeatedly until no damaged sequence is left.
No. A sequence is only changed when its characters form valid UTF-8 and the result is a plausible character. Words like São, Müller or CANCIÓN» are left as they are, so files that mix damaged and correct rows are safe. Every change is shown in the preview before you download.
No. The replacement character � and question marks mean the original bytes were thrown away when the file was saved. The tool counts them so you know, but no tool can bring them back; you need the original export.
The file is decoded as Windows-1252 and saved as UTF-8 with BOM, so accents keep working in Excel, Google Sheets and any modern program. Nothing else changes.
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