Mojibake

TheUTF-8-encodedJapanese Wikipedia article forMojibakedisplayed as if interpreted asWindows-1252

TheUTF-8-encodedRussian Wikipedia article on Church Slavonicdisplayed as if interpreted asKOI8-R

Mojibake(Japanese:Văn tự hóa け;IPA:[mod͡ʑibake],"character transformation" ) is the garbled or gibberish text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintendedcharacter encoding.The result is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, often from a differentwriting system.

This display may include the genericreplacement character( "�" ) in places where thebinaryrepresentation is considered invalid. A replacement can also involve multiple consecutive symbols, as viewed in one encoding, when the same binary code constitutes one symbol in the other encoding. This is either because of differing constant length encoding (as in Asian 16-bit encodings vs European 8-bit encodings), or the use of variable length encodings (notablyUTF-8andUTF-16).

Failed rendering of glyphs due to either missing fonts or missing glyphs in a font is a different issue that is not to be confused with mojibake. Symptoms of this failed rendering include blocks with thecode pointdisplayed inhexadecimalor using the generic replacement character. Importantly, these replacements arevalidand are the result of correct error handling by the software.

Causes

To correctly reproduce the original text that was encoded, the correspondence between the encoded data and the notion of its encoding must be preserved (i.e. the source and target encoding standards must be the same). As mojibake is the instance of non-compliance between these, it can be achieved by manipulating the data itself, or just relabelling it.

Mojibake is often seen with text data that have been tagged with a wrong encoding; it may not even be tagged at all, but moved between computers with different default encodings. A major source of trouble arecommunication protocolsthat rely on settings on each computer rather than sending or storingmetadatatogether with the data.

The differing default settings between computers are in part due to differing deployments ofUnicodeamongoperating systemfamilies, and partly the legacy encodings' specializations for differentwriting systemsof human languages. WhereasLinux distributionsmostly switched toUTF-8in 2004,Microsoft Windowsgenerally uses UTF-16, and sometimes uses 8-bit code pages for text files in different languages.

For somewriting systems,such asJapanese,several encodings have historically been employed, causing users to see mojibake relatively often. As an example, the wordmojibakeitself ( "Văn tự hóa け" ) stored asEUC-JPmight be incorrectly displayed as "ﾊｸｻ�ｽ､ｱ", "ﾊｸｻ luật ｽ､ｱ" (MS-932), or "ﾊｸｻ yển ｽ､ｱ" if interpreted as Shift-JIS, or as "ʸ»ú²½¤±" in software that assumes text to be in theWindows-1252orISO 8859-1encodings, usually labelledWesternorWestern European.This is further exacerbated if other locales are involved: the same text stored asUTF-8appears as "Hoa � chập liên tiếng động lớn 縺�" if interpreted as Shift-JIS, as "文字化け" if interpreted as Western, or (for example) as "鏂 囧 瓧 sầm ti 亼" if interpreted as being in aGBK(Mainland China) locale.

Mojibake example

Original text	Văn						Tự						Hóa						け
Raw bytes of EUC-JP encoding	CA			B8			BB			FA			B2			BD			A4			B1
EUC-JP bytes interpreted as Shift-JIS	ﾊ			ｸ			ｻ			Yển						ｽ			､			ｱ
EUC-JP bytes interpreted as GBK	Thỉ						Cơ						Bước						け
EUC-JP bytes interpreted as Windows-1252	Ê			¸			»			ú			²			½			¤			±
Raw bytes of UTF-8 encoding	E6		96		87		E5		AD		97		E5		8C		96		E3		81		91
UTF-8 bytes interpreted as Shift-JIS	Hoa				�		Chập				Liên				Tiếng động lớn				縺				�
UTF-8 bytes interpreted as GBK	鏂				囧				瓧				Sầm				Ti				亼
UTF-8 bytes interpreted as Windows-1252	æ		–		‡		å		SHY		—		å		Œ		–		ã		HOP		‘

Underspecification

If the encoding is not specified, it is up to the software to decide it by other means. Depending on the type of software, the typical solution is either configuration orcharset detectionheuristics. Both are prone to mis-prediction.

The encoding oftext filesis affected bylocalesetting, which depends on the user's language, brand ofoperating system,and many other conditions. Therefore, the assumed encoding is systematically wrong for files that come from a computer with a different setting, or even from a differentlylocalizedsoftware within the same system. For Unicode, one solution is to use abyte order mark,but forsource codeand other machine readable text, many parsers do not tolerate this. Another is storing the encoding as metadata in the file system. File systems that supportextended file attributescan store this asuser.charset.This also requires support in software that wants to take advantage of it, but does not disturb other software.

While a few encodings are easy to detect, such as UTF-8, there are many that are hard to distinguish (seecharset detection). Aweb browsermay not be able to distinguish a page coded inEUC-JPand another inShift-JISif the encoding is not assigned explicitly usingHTTP headerssent along with the documents, or using theHTMLdocument'smeta tagsthat are used to substitute for missing HTTP headers if the server cannot be configured to send the proper HTTP headers; seecharacter encodings in HTML.

Mis-specification

Mojibake also occurs when the encoding is incorrectly specified. This often happens between encodings that are similar. For example, theEudoraemail client forWindowswas known to send emails labelled asISO 8859-1that were in realityWindows-1252.Windows-1252 contains extra printable characters in theC1range (the most frequently seen being curvedquotation marksand extradashes), that were not displayed properly in software complying with the ISO standard; this especially affected software running under other operating systems such asUnix.

User oversight

Of the encodings still in common use, many originated from takingASCIIand appending atop it; as a result, these encodings are partially compatible with each other. Examples of this include Windows-1252 and ISO 8859-1. People thus may mistake the expanded encoding set they are using with plain ASCII.

Overspecification

When there are layers of protocols, each trying to specify the encoding based on different information, the least certain information may be misleading to the recipient. For example, consider aweb serverserving a static HTML file over HTTP. The character set may be communicated to the client in any number of 3 ways:

• in the HTTP header. This information can be based on server configuration (for instance, when serving a file off disk) or controlled by the application running on the server (for dynamic websites).
• in the file, as anHTML meta tag(http-equivorcharset) or theencodingattribute of anXMLdeclaration. This is the encoding that the author meant to save the particular file in.
• in the file, as abyte order mark.This is the encoding that the author's editor actually saved it in. Unless an accidental encoding conversion has happened (by opening it in one encoding and saving it in another), this will be correct. It is, however, only available inUnicodeencodings such as UTF-8 or UTF-16.

Lack of hardware or software support

Much older hardware is typically designed to support only one character set and the character set typically cannot be altered. The character table contained within the display firmware will be localized to have characters for the country the device is to be sold in, and typically the table differs from country to country. As such, these systems will potentially display mojibake when loading text generated on a system from a different country. Likewise, many early operating systems do not support multiple encoding formats and thus will end up displaying mojibake if made to display non-standard text—early versions ofMicrosoft WindowsandPalm OSfor example, are localized on a per-country basis and will only support encoding standards relevant to the country the localized version will be sold in, and will display mojibake if a file containing a text in a different encoding format from the version that the OS is designed to support is opened.

Resolutions

Applications usingUTF-8as a default encoding may achieve a greater degree of interoperability because of its widespread use and backward compatibility withUS-ASCII.UTF-8 also has the ability to be directly recognised by a simple algorithm, so that well written software should be able to avoid mi xing UTF-8 up with other encodings.

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 areweb browsersandword processors.Modern browsers and word processors often support a wide array of character encodings. Browsers often allow a user to change theirrendering engine'sencoding setting on the fly, while word processors allow the user to select the appropriate encoding when opening a file. It may take sometrial and errorfor 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. InWindows XPor later, a user also has the option to useMicrosoft 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 asWindows 98;to resolve this issue on earlier operating systems, a user would have to use third party font rendering applications.

Problems in different writing systems

English

Mojibake in English texts generally occurs in punctuation, such asem dashes(—),en dashes(–), andcurly quotes( “,”,‘,’), but rarely in character text, since most encodings agree withASCIIon the encoding of theEnglish Alpha bet.For example, thepound sign£will appear as£if it was encoded by the sender asUTF-8but interpreted by the recipient as one of the Western European encodings (CP1252orISO 8859-1). If iterated using CP1252, this can lead to£,£,£,£,and so on.

Similarly, theright single quotation mark(’), when encoded in UTF-8 and decoded using Windows-1252, becomes’,’,’,and so on.

Some computers did, in older eras, have vendor-specific encodings which caused mismatch also for English text. Commodorebrand8-bitcomputers usedPETSCIIencoding, particularly notable for inverting the upper and lower case compared to standardASCII.PETSCII printers worked fine on other computers of the era, but inverted the case of all letters. IBMmainframesuse theEBCDICencoding which does not match ASCII at all.

Other Western European languages

The Alpha bets of theNorth Germanic languages,Catalan,Romanian,Finnish,French,German,Italian,PortugueseandSpanishare all extensions of theLatin Alpha bet.The additional characters are typically the ones that become corrupted, making texts only mildly unreadable with mojibake:

• å,ä,öinFinnishandSwedish(š and ž are present in some Finnish loanwords, é marginally in Swedish, mainly also in loanwords)
• à, ç, è, é, ï, í, ò, ó, ú, ü inCatalan
• æ,ø,å inNorwegianandDanishas well as optional acute accents on é etc for disambiguation
• á, é, ó,ij,è, ë, ï inDutch
• ä, ö,ü,andßinGerman
• á,ð,í,ó,ú,ý,æ, ø inFaroese
• á, ð,é,í, ó, ú, ý,þ,æ, ö inIcelandic
• à, â, ç, è, é, ë, ê, ï, î, ô, ù, û, ü, ÿ, æ, œ inFrench
• à, è, é, ì, ò, ù inItalian
• á, é, í,ñ,ó, ú, ü,¡, ¿inSpanish
• à, á, â, ã, ç, é, ê, í, ó, ô, õ, ú inPortuguese(üno longer used)
• á, é, í, ó, ú inIrish
• à, è, ì, ò, ù inScottish Gaelic
• ă, â, î, ș, ț inRomanian
• £inBritish English(æ and œ are rarely used)

…and their uppercase counterparts, if applicable.

These are languages for which theISO 8859-1character set (also known asLatin 1orWestern) has been in use. However, ISO 8859-1 has been obsoleted by two competing standards, the backward compatibleWindows-1252,and the slightly alteredISO 8859-15.Both add theEuro sign€ and the French œ, but otherwise any confusion of these three character sets does not create mojibake in these languages. Furthermore, it is always safe to interpret ISO 8859-1 as Windows-1252, and fairly safe to interpret it as ISO 8859-15, in particular with respect to the Euro sign, which replaces the rarely usedcurrency sign(¤). However, with the advent ofUTF-8,mojibake has become more common in certain scenarios, e.g. exchange of text files betweenUNIXandWindowscomputers, due to UTF-8's incompatibility with Latin-1 and Windows-1252. But UTF-8 has the ability to be directly recognised by a simple algorithm, so that well written software should be able to avoid mi xing UTF-8 up with other encodings, so this was most common when many had software not supporting UTF-8. Most of these languages were supported by MS-DOS default CP437 and other machine default encodings, except ASCII, so problems when buying an operating system version were less common. Windows and MS-DOS are not compatible, however.

In Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and German, vowels are rarely repeated, and it is usually obvious when one character gets corrupted, e.g. the second letter in the Swedish wordkärlek( "love" ) when it is encoded in UTF-8 but decoded in Western, producing "kÃ⁠¤rlek", orfürin German, which becomes "für". This way, even though the reader has to guess what the original letter is, almost all texts remain legible. Finnish, on the other hand, frequently uses repeating vowels in words likehääyö( "wedding night" ) which can make corrupted text very hard to read (e.g.hääyöappears as "hÃ⁠¤Ã⁠¤yÃ⁠¶" ). Icelandic has ten possibly confounding characters, and Faroese has eight, making many words almost completely unintelligible when corrupted (e.g. Icelandicþjóðlöð,"outstanding hospitality", appears as "þjóðlöð" ).

In German,Buchstabensalat( "letter salad" ) is a common term for this phenomenon, in Spanish,deformación(literally "deformation" ) is used, and in Portuguese,desformatação(literally "deformatting" ) is used.

Some users transliterate their writing when using a computer, either by omitting the problematic diacritics, or by using digraph replacements (å → aa, ä/æ → ae, ö/ø → oe, ü → ue etc.). Thus, an author might write "ueber" instead of "über", which is standard practice in German whenumlautsare not available. The latter practice seems to be better tolerated in the German language sphere than in theNordic countries.For example, in Norwegian, digraphs are associated with archaic Danish, and may be used jokingly. However, digraphs are useful in communication with other parts of the world. As an example, the Norwegian football playerOle Gunnar Solskjærhad his last name spelled "SOLSKJAER" on his uniform when he played forManchester United.

An artifact ofUTF-8misinterpreted asISO 8859-1,"Ring meg nå"being rendered as" Ring meg nÃ¥ ", was seen in 2014 in an SMS scam targeting Norway.

Swedish example	Source encoding	Target encoding	Result (Characters in red are incorrect.)
Smörgås (open sandwich)
	MS-DOS 437	ISO 8859-1	Sm”rg†s
	UTF-8		Smörgås
		IBM/CP037 (EBCDIC)	ë_C¶ÊÅCvË
		Mac Roman	Smörgås
	ISO 8859-1		SmˆrgÂs

The same problem occurs also in Romanian, see these examples:

Romanian example	Source encoding	Target encoding	Result (Characters in red are incorrect.)
Cenușă (ash)
	UTF-8
		ASCII	Cenușă
		ISO 8859-2	Cenușă
		OEM 737	Cenu╚β─Δ
		Shift-JIS	Cenuﾈ biện
		TIS-620	Cenuศ™ฤƒ
		IBM/CP037 (EBCDIC)	äÁ>ÍHrDc

Central and Eastern European

Users ofCentralandEastern Europeanlanguages 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 withdiacriticalcharacters (seeISO/IEC 8859andKOI-8), often also varying by operating system.

Hungarian

InHungarian,the phenomenon is referred to asbetűszemét,meaning "letter garbage". Hungarian has been particularly susceptible as it contains the accented letters á, é, í, ó, ú, ö, ü (all present in the Latin-1 character set), plus the two charactersőandűwhich are not in Latin-1. These two characters can be correctly encoded in Latin-2, Windows-1250, and Unicode. However, 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 a corrupted e-mail with the nonsense phrase"Árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép"(literally "Flood-resistant mirror-drilling machine" ) which contains all accented characters used in Hungarian.

Examples

Hungarian example	Source encoding	Target encoding	Result	Occurrence
ÁRVÍZTŰRŐ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép
	UTF-8Quoted-printable	7-bit ASCII	=C3=81RV=C3=8DZT=C5=B0R=C5=90T=C3=9CK=C3=96RF=C3=9AR=C3=93G=C3=89P=C3=A1rv=C3=ADzt=C5=B1r=C5=91t=C3=BCk=C3=B6rf=C3=BAr=C3=B3g=C3=A9p	Mainly caused by incorrectly configured mail servers but may occur inSMSmessages on some cell phones as well.
	ISO 8859-2Quoted-printable		=C1RV=CDZT=DBR=D5T=DCK=D6RF=DAR=D3G=C9P =E1rv=EDzt=FBr=F5t=FCk=F6rf=FAr=F3g=E9p
	CWI-2	CP 437	ÅRVìZTÿRºTÜKÖRFùRòGÉP árvíztûrôtükörfúrógép	TheCWI-2encoding was designed so that Hungarian text remains fairly well-readable even if the device on the receiving end uses one of the default encodings (CP 437orCP 850). This encoding was used very heavily between the early 1980s and early 1990s, but nowadays it is completely deprecated.
	CP 852		╡RV╓ZTδRèTÜKÖRFΘRαGÉP árvízt√rïtükörfúrógép	This was very common in the days ofDOS,as the text was often encoded usingcode page 852( "Central European" ), but the software on the receiving end often did not support CP 852 and instead tried to display text usingCP 437orCP 850.Lowercase letters are mainly correct, except for ű and ő. Ü/ü and Ö/ö are correct because CP 437 and CP 850 were made compatible with German. Although this is rare nowadays, it can still be seen in places such as on printed prescriptions and cheques.
		CP 850	ÁRVÍZTÙRèTÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP árvízt¹rïtükörfúrógép
		Windows-1250	µRVÖZTëRŠTšK™RFéRŕGP rvˇztűr‹tk"rfŁr˘g‚p	Both encodings are Central European, but the text is encoded with the DOS encoding and decoded with the Windows encoding. The use of ű is correct.
		Mac Roman	µRV÷ZTÎRäTöKôRFÈR‡GêP †rv°zt˚rãtÅkîrf£r¢gÇp	Also common in the days of DOS, this could be seen when Apple computers tried to display Hungarian text sent using DOS or Windows machines, as they would often default to Apple's own encoding.
	Windows-1250		¡RVÕZT€R’T‹K÷RF⁄R”G…P ·rvÌzt˚rıt¸kˆrf˙rÛgÈp
		CP 852	┴RV═ZT█RŇT▄KÍRF┌RËG╔P ßrvÝztűr§tŘk÷rf˙rˇgÚp	Both encodings are Central European, but the text is encoded with the Windows encoding and decoded with the DOS encoding. The use of ű is correct.
		Windows-1252	ÁRVÍZTÛRÕTÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP árvíztûrõtükörfúrógép	The default Western European Windows encoding is used instead of the Central-European one. Only ő-Ő (õ-Õ) and ű-Ű (û-Û) are wrong, and the text is completely readable. This is the most common error nowadays; due to ignorance, it occurs often on webpages or even in printed media.
	UTF-8		ÁRVÍZTÅ°RŐTÃœKÖRFÚRà "GÉP árvÃztűrÅ‘tükörfúrógép	Mainly caused by web services or webmail clients that are configured incorrectly or not tested for international usage (as the problem remains concealed for English texts). In this case the actual (often generated) content is inUTF-8,but some older software may default to localized encodings if UTF-8 is not explicitly specified in the HTML headers.
		Mac Roman	ÁRVÍZTŰRŐTÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP árvíztűrőtükörfúrógép

Polish

Prior to the creation ofISO 8859-2in 1987, users of various computing platforms used their owncharacter encodingssuch asAmigaPLon Amiga, Atari Club on Atari ST and Masovia, IBMCP852,MazoviaandWindows CP1250on IBM PCs. Polish companies selling earlyDOScomputers created their own mutually-incompatible ways to encode Polish characters and simply reprogrammed theEPROMsof the video cards (typicallyCGA,EGA,orHercules) to providehardware code pageswith the needed glyphs for Polish—arbitrarily located without reference to where other computer sellers had placed them.

The situation began to improve when, after pressure from academic and user groups,ISO 8859-2succeeded 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 askrzaczki([ˈkʂät͜ʂ.ki],lit. "little shrubs" ).

Russian and other Cyrillic-based Alpha bets

Mojibake is colloquially calledkrakozyabry(кракозя́бры[krɐkɐˈzʲæbrɪ̈]) inRussian,which was and remains complicated by several systems for encodingCyrillic.TheSoviet Unionand earlyRussian FederationdevelopedKOI encodings(Kod Obmena Informatsiey,Код Обмена Информацией,which translates to "Code for Information Exchange" ). This began with Cyrillic-only 7-bitKOI7,based onASCIIbut with Latin and some other characters replaced with Cyrillic letters. Then came 8-bitKOI8encoding that is anASCII extensionwhich encodes Cyrillic letters only with high-bit set octets corresponding to 7-bit codes from KOI7. It is for this reason that KOI8 text, even Russian, remains partially readable after stripping the eighth bit, which was considered as a major advantage in the age of8BITMIME-unaware email systems. For example, the words "Школа русского языка"(shkola russkogo yazyka), when encoded in KOI8 and passed through the high bit stripping process, end up being rendered as "[KOLA RUSSKOGO qZYKA". Eventually, KOI8 gained different flavors for Russian and Bulgarian (KOI8-R), Ukrainian (KOI8-U),Belarusian(KOI8-RU), and evenTajik(KOI8-T).

Meanwhile, in the West,Code page 866supportedUkrainianandBelarusian,as well as Russian andBulgarianinMS-DOS.ForMicrosoft Windows,Code Page 1251added support forSerbianandother Slavic variants of Cyrillic.

Most recently, theUnicodeencoding includescode pointsfor virtually all characters in all languages, including all Cyrillic characters.

Before Unicode, it was necessary to match text encoding with a font using the same encoding system; failure to do this produced unreadablegibberishwhose specific appearance varied depending on the exact combination of text and font encoding. For example, attempting to view non-Unicode Cyrillic text using a font that is limited to the Latin Alpha bet, or using the default ( "Western" ) encoding, typically results in text that consists almost entirely of capitalized vowels with diacritical marks (e.g. KOI8 "Библиотека"(biblioteka,library) becomes "âÉÂÌÉÏÔÅËÁ", while "Школа русского языка" (shkola russkogo yazyka,Russian-language school) becomes "ûËÏÌÁ ÒÕÓÓËÏÇÏ ÑÚÙËÁ" ). Using Code Page 1251 to view text in KOI8, or vice versa, results in garbled text that consists mostly of capital letters (KOI8 and Code Page 1251 share the same ASCII region, but KOI8 has uppercase letters in the region where Code Page 1251 has lowercase, and vice versa).

During the early years of the Russian sector of the World Wide Web, both KOI8 and Code Page 1251 were common. Nearly all websites now use Unicode, but as of November 2023,an estimated 0.35% of all web pages worldwide – all languages included – are still encoded in Code Page 1251, while less than 0.003% of sites are still encoded in KOI8-R.Though the HTML standard includes the ability to specify the encoding for any given web page in its source,this is sometimes neglected, forcing the user to switch encodings in the browser manually.

In Bulgarian, mojibake is often calledmajmunica(маймуница), meaning "monkey's [ Alpha bet]". InSerbian,it is calledđubre(ђубре), meaning "trash".Unlike the former USSR, South Slavs never used something like KOI8, and Code Page 1251 was the dominant Cyrillic encoding before Unicode; therefore, these languages experienced fewer encoding incompatibility troubles than Russian. In the 1980s, Bulgarian computers used their ownMIK encoding,which is superficially similar to (although incompatible with) CP866.

Example

Original text	Source encoding	Target encoding	Result
Кракозябры
	Windows-1251	KOI8-R	йПЮЙНГЪАПШ
	KOI8-R	Windows-1251	лТБЛПЪСВТЩ
		Windows-1252	ëÒÁËÏÚÑÂÒÙ
	MS-DOS 855		Çá ÆÖóÞ¢áñ
	Windows-1251		Êðàêîçÿáðû
	UTF-8		Кракозябры
		KOI8-R	п я─п╟п╨п╬п╥я▐п╠я─я▀ (The second character is anon-breaking space)
		MS-DOS 855	лџЛђл░л║лЙлиЛЈл▒ЛђЛІ
		Windows-1251	Кракозябры
		Mac Roman	–ö—Ä–∞–∫–æ–∑—è–±—Ä—ã
		Mac Cyrillic	–Ъ—А–∞–Ї–Њ–Ј—П–±—А—Л

Yugoslav languages

Croatian,Bosnian,Serbian(the seceding varieties ofSerbo-Croatianlanguage) andSlovenianadd to the basic Latin Alpha bet the letters š, đ, č, ć, ž, and their capital counterparts Š, Đ, Č, Ć, Ž (only č/Č, š/Š and ž/Ž in Slovenian; officially, although others are used when needed, mostly in foreign names, as well). All of these letters are defined inLatin-2andWindows-1250,while only some (š, Š, ž, Ž, Đ) exist in the usual OS-defaultWindows-1252,and are there because of some other languages.

Although Mojibake can occur with any of these characters, the letters that are not included in Windows-1252 are much more prone to errors. Thus, even nowadays, "šđčćž ŠĐČĆŽ" is often displayed as "šðèæž ŠÐÈÆŽ", although ð, È, and Æ are never used in Slavic languages.

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.

TheWindows-1252encoding is important because the English versions of the Windows operating system are most widespread, not localized ones.The reasons for this include a relatively small and fragmented market, increasing the price of high quality localization, a high degree of software piracy (in turn caused by high price of software compared to income), which discourages localization efforts, and people preferring English versions of Windows and other software.

The drive todifferentiateCroatian from Serbian, Bosnian from Croatian and Serbian, and now evenMontenegrinfrom the other three creates many problems. There are many different localizations, using different standards and of different quality. There are no common translations for the vast amount of computer terminology originating in English. In the end, people use English loanwords ( "kompjuter" for "computer", "kompajlirati" for "compile," etc.), and if they are unaccustomed to the translated terms, they may not understand what some option in a menu is supposed to do based on the translated phrase. Therefore, people who understand English, as well as those who are accustomed to English terminology (who are most, because English terminology is also mostly taught in schools because of these problems) regularly choose the original English versions of non-specialist software.

When Cyrillic script is used (forMacedonianand partiallySerbian), the problem is similar toother Cyrillic-based scripts.

Newer versions of English Windows allow thecode pageto be changed (older versions require special English versions with this support), but this setting can be and often was incorrectly set. For example, Windows 98 and Windows Me can be set to most non-right-to-leftsingle-bytecode pages including 1250, but only at install time.

Caucasian languages

The writing systems of certainlanguages of the Caucasusregion, including the scripts ofGeorgianandArmenian,may produce mojibake. This problem is particularly acute in the case ofArmSCIIor ARMSCII, a set of obsolete character encodings for the Armenian Alpha bet which have been superseded by Unicode standards. ArmSCII is not widely used because of a lack of support in the computer industry. For example,Microsoft Windowsdoes not support it.

Asian encodings

Another type of mojibake occurs when text encoded in a single-byte encoding is erroneously parsed in a multi-byte encoding, such as one of the encodings forEast Asian languages.With this kind of mojibake more than one (typically two) characters are corrupted at once. For example, if the Swedish wordkärlekis encoded in Windows-1252 but decoded using GBK, it will appear as "k鋜lek", where "är"is parsed as" 鋜 ". 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 (e.g." än "becomes" 鋘 "). 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 facts",may be misinterpreted.

Vietnamese

Main article:Vietnamese language and computers

InVietnamese,the phenomenon is calledchữ ma(Hán–Nôm:𡨸 ma, "ghost characters" ) orloạn mã(from Chinese loạn mã,luànmǎ). It can occur when a computer tries to decode text encoded in UTF-8 asWindows-1258,TCVN3 or VNI. In Vietnam,chữ mawas commonly seen on computers that ran pre-Vista versions of Windows or cheap mobile phones.

Example	Source encoding	Target encoding	Result
Trăm năm trong cõi người ta 𤾓𢆥𥪞𡎝𠊛 chút (Truyện Kiều,Nguyễn Du)
	UTF-8	Windows-1258	Trăm năm trong cõi người ta đ¤¾ “đ¢†¥đ¥ªžđ¡Žđ Š›äº›
		TCVN3	Tr¨m n¨m trong câi ngêi ta �¤¾��¢��¥¥ª��¡�����¾ä��
		VNI (Windows)	Traêm naêm trong coõi ngöôøi ta �����������������������
		Mac Roman	Trăm năm trong cõi người ta 𤾓𢆥𥪞𡎝𠊛些

Japanese

Main article:Japanese language and computers

InJapan,mojibake is especially problematic as there are many different Japanese text encodings. Alongside Unicode encodings (UTF-8 and UTF-16), there are other standard encodings, such asShift-JIS(Windows machines) andEUC-JP(UNIX systems). Even to this day, mojibake is often encountered by both Japanese and non-Japanese people when attempting to run software written for the Japanese market.

Original text	Source encoding	Target encoding	Result
こ の メールは toàn dạng へ の メッセージです.
	UTF-8
		UTF-7	���̃��(�q���Y�_�C�G�b�g)
		EUC-JP	�����＜� nếu ������ hãn �� ngô ���＜��� chỉ � nếu � ngô �с����
		Shift-JIS	縺 thế �繝｡繝ｼ繝ｫ縺ｯ逧�ｧ không ∈縺ｮ繝｡繝�そ繝ｼ繧ｸ縺ｧ縺 nột €�
		Mac Roman	このメールは皆様へのメッセージです。
		ISO 8859-6	ك“ك�كƒ�كƒ�كƒ�ك�هš†ن�˜ك�ك�كƒ�كƒƒك‚؛كƒ�ك‚�ك�ك™ك€‚
		Windows-1252	だ“のメールは皆様へのメッセージです。
	EUC-JP		¤³¤Î¥á¡¼¥ë¤Ï³§ÍͤؤΥá¥Ã¥»¡¼¥¸¤Ç¤¹¡£
	Shift-JIS		‚±‚̃[ƒ‹‚ÍŠF—l‚ւ̃ƒbƒZ[ƒW‚Å‚·B

Chinese

InChinese,the same phenomenon is calledLuàn mǎ(Pinyin,Simplified ChineseLoạn mã,Traditional ChineseLoạn mã,meaning 'chaotic code'), and can occur when computerised text is encoded in oneChinese character encodingbut is displayed using the wrong encoding. When this occurs, it is often possible to fix the issue by switching the character encoding without loss of data. The situation is complicated because of the existence of several Chinese character encoding systems in use, the most common ones being:Unicode,Big5,andGuobiao(with several backward compatible versions), and the possibility of Chinese characters being encoded using Japanese encoding.

It is relatively easy to identify the original encoding whenluànmǎoccurs in Guobiao encodings:

Original text	Source encoding	Target encoding	Result	Note
Tam Quốc Chí Tào Tháo truyền	Big5	GB	�T cánh в biến cự bụng	Garbled characters with almost no hint of original meaning. The red character is not a valid codepoint inGB 2312.
Văn tự hóa けテスト	Shift-JIS		Ngạn 帤 đảo 偗 nghiêu 僗 giản	Kana is displayed as characters with the nhân (Chinese:Đơn người bên;pinyin:dānrénpáng) radical, while kanji are other characters. Many of the substitute characters are extremely uncommon in modern Chinese. Somewhat easy to identify due to the presence of multiple consecutive nhân characters.
디제이맥스 테크니카	EUC-KR		Ngậm lực vớt Canxi keo vứt nông thông mặc	Randomsimplified characterswhich in most cases make no sense. Probably the easiest to identify because of spaces between every several characters.

An additional problem in Chinese occurs when rare or antiquated characters, many of which are still used in personal or place names, do not exist in some encodings. Examples of this are:

• TheBig5encoding's lack of the "Huyên" (xuān) in the name ofTaiwanesepoliticianWang Chien-shien(Chinese:Vương kiến huyên;pinyin:Wáng Jiànxuān), the "Khôn" (kūn) in the name ofYu Shyi-kun(simplified Chinese:Du tích khôn;traditional Chinese:Du tích khôn;pinyin:Yóu Xíkūn), and the "Triết" (zhé) in the name of singerDavid Tao(Chinese:Đào triết;pinyin:Táo Zhé),
• GB 2312's lack of the "Dong" (róng) in ex-PRC PremierZhu Rongji(Chinese:Chu dong cơ;pinyin:Zhū Róngjī), and
• GBK's lack of thecopyright symbol "©".

Newspapers have dealt with missing characters in various ways, including using image editing software to synthesize them by combining other radicals and characters; using a picture of the personalities (in the case of people's names), or simply substituting homophones in the hope that readers would be able to make the correct inference.

Indic text

A similar effect can occur inBrahmic or Indic scriptsofSouth Asia,used in suchIndo-Aryan or Indic languagesasHindustani(Hindi-Urdu),Bengali,Punjabi,Marathi,and others, even if the character set employed 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.

One example of this is the oldWikipedia logo,which attempts to show the character analogous to "wi" (the first syllable of "Wikipedia" ) on each of many puzzle pieces. The puzzle piece meant to bear theDevanagaricharacter for "wi" instead used to display the "wa" character followed by an unpaired "i"modifiervowel, easily recognizable as mojibake generated by a computer not configured to display Indic text.The logo as redesigned as of May 2010has fixed these errors.

The idea of Plain Text requires the operating system to provide a font to display Unicode codes. This font is different from OS to OS for Singhala and it makes orthographically incorrect glyphs for some letters (syllables) across all operating systems. For instance, the 'reph', the short form for 'r' is a diacritic that normally goes on top of a plain letter. However, it is wrong to go on top of some letters like 'ya' or 'la' in specific contexts. For Sanskritic words or names inherited by modern languages, such as कार्य, IAST:kārya,or आर्या, IAST:āryā,it is apt to put it on top of these letters. By contrast, for similar sounds in modern languages which result from their specific rules, it is not put on top, such as the word करणाऱ्या, IAST:karaṇāryā,a stem form of the common word करणारा/री, IAST:karaṇārā/rī,in theMarathi language.But it happens in most operating systems. This appears to be a fault of internal programming of the fonts. In Mac OS and iOS, the muurdhaja l (dark l) and 'u' combination and its long form both yield wrong shapes.

Some Indic and Indic-derived scripts, most notablyLao,were not officially supported byWindows XPuntil the release ofVista.However, various sites have made free-to-download fonts.

Burmese

Due to Western sanctionsand the late arrival of Burmese language support in computers,much of the early Burmese localization was homegrown without international cooperation. The prevailing means of Burmese support is via theZawgyi font,a font that was created as aUnicode fontbut was in fact only partially Unicode compliant.In the Zawgyi font, somecodepointsfor Burmese script were implemented as specified inUnicode,but others were not.The Unicode Consortium refers to this asad hoc font encodings.With the advent of mobile phones, mobile vendors such as Samsung and Huawei simply replaced the Unicode compliant system fonts with Zawgyi versions.

Due to thesead hocencodings, communications between users of Zawgyi and Unicode would render as garbled text. To get around this issue, content producers would make posts in both Zawgyi and Unicode.Myanmar government designated 1 October 2019 as "U-Day" to officially switch to Unicode.The full transition was estimated to take two years.

African languages

In certainwriting systems of Africa,unencoded text is unreadable. Texts that may produce mojibake include those from theHorn of Africasuch as theGe'ez scriptinEthiopiaandEritrea,used forAmharic,Tigre,and other languages, and theSomali language,which employs theOsmanya Alpha bet.InSouthern Africa,theMwangwego Alpha betis used to write languages ofMalawiand theMandombe Alpha betwas created for theDemocratic Republic of the Congo,but these are not generally supported. Various other writing systems native toWest Africapresent similar problems, such as theN'Ko Alpha bet,used forManding languagesinGuinea,and theVai syllabary,used inLiberia.

Arabic

Another affected language isArabic(seebelow), in which text becomes completely unreadable when the encodings do not match.

Examples

Arabic example	Browser rendering	Source encoding	Target encoding	Result
(Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
	الإعلان العالمى لحقوق الإنسان
		UTF-8	KOI8-R	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├
			Windows-1250	الإعلان العالمى Ů„Ř­­Ů‚وق الإنسان
			Windows-1251	Ш§Щ„ШҐШ№Щ„Ш§Щ† Ш§Щ„Ш№Ш§Щ„Щ…Щ‰ Щ„Ш­Щ‚Щ€Щ‚ Ш§Щ„ШҐЩ†ШіШ§Щ†
			Windows-1252	الإعلان العالمى لحقوق الإنسان
			Windows-1256	ط§ظ„ط¥ط¹ظ„ط§ظ† ط§ظ„ط¹ط§ظ„ظ…ظ‰ ظ„ط­ظ‚ظˆظ‚ ط§ظ„ط¥ظ†ط³ط§ظ†
			ISO 8859-5	иЇй�иЅиЙй�иЇй� иЇй�иЙиЇй�й�й� й�ий�й�й� иЇй�иЅй�иГиЇй�
			ISO 8859-6	ظ�ع„ظ�ظ�ع„ظ�ع† ظ�ع„ظ�ظ�ع„ع ع‰ ع„ظ­ع‚عˆع‚ ظ�ع„ظ�ع†ظ�ظ�ع†
			CP 852	ěž┘äěąě╣┘äěž┘ć ěž┘äě╣ěž┘ä┘ů┘ë ┘äěş┘é┘ł┘é ěž┘äěą┘ćě│ěž┘ć
			CP 866	╪з┘Д╪е╪╣┘Д╪з┘Ж ╪з┘Д╪╣╪з┘Д┘Е┘Й ┘Д╪н┘В┘И┘В ╪з┘Д╪е┘Ж╪│╪з┘Ж
			Mac Arabic	ظ'عÑظ٪ظ٩عÑظ'عÜ ظ'عÑظ٩ظ'عÑعÖعâ عÑظ-عÇعàعÇ ظ'عÑظ٪عÜظ٣ظ'عÜ
			Mac Roman	الإعلان العالمى لحقوق الإنسان
		Mac Arabic		«‰≈Ÿ‰«Ê†«‰Ÿ«‰ÂȆ‰Õ‚Ë‚†«‰≈Ê” «Ê
		Windows-1256		«·≈⁄·«‰ «·⁄«·„Ï ·ÕfiÊfi «·≈‰” «‰
			Windows-1252	ÇáÅÚáÇä ÇáÚÇáãì áÍÞæÞ ÇáÅäÓÇä

The examples in this article do not have UTF-8 as browser setting, because UTF-8 is easily recognisable, so if a browser supports UTF-8 it should recognise it automatically, and not try to interpret something else as UTF-8.

See also

• Code point
• Replacement character
• Substitute character
• Newline– The conventions for representing the line break differ between Windows and Unix systems. Though most software supports both conventions (which is trivial), software that must preserve or display the difference (e.g.version control systemsanddata comparisontools) can get substantially more difficult to use if not adhering to one convention.
• Byte order mark– The mostin-bandway to store the encoding together with the data – prepend it. This is by intention invisible to humans using compliant software, but will by design be perceived as "garbage characters" to incompliant software (including manyinterpreters).
• HTML entities– An encoding of special characters in HTML, mostly optional, but required for certain characters toescapeinterpretation as markup. While failure to apply this transformation is a vulnerability (seecross-site scripting), applying it too many times results in garbling of these characters. For example, the quotation mark"becomes",","and so on.
• Bush hid the facts

External links

• The dictionary definition ofmojibakeat Wiktionary
• Media related toMojibakeat Wikimedia Commons