Text Encoding: Why UTF-8 Won

The Babel of the 90s

Before UTF-8, opening a document created in another country often resulted in "mojibake"—scrambled, unreadable characters. ASCII only covered 128 characters (English). Other languages used fragmented 8-bit encodings (like ISO-8859-1 for Western European, Shift-JIS for Japanese).

UTF-8 solved this by using a variable-width encoding scheme. The first 128 characters exactly match ASCII (using 1 byte), while other characters use up to 4 bytes. This provided backward compatibility while supporting over 149,000 Unicode characters.

FAQ

How do I fix a CSV showing weird characters?

It was likely saved in a legacy encoding (like Windows-1252) but opened as UTF-8. Use our Hex Viewer to check the byte markers, and re-import explicitly selecting the correct encoding.

Next Steps

Put this theory into practice. Use our client-side tools to inspect documents directly in your browser.

Open Developer Tools