Mojibake

What Is Mojibake?

Mojibake (文字化け, pronounced "mo-ji-ba-ke") is Japanese for "character transformation" or "garbled characters." It describes the phenomenon where text is displayed or processed using the wrong character encoding, causing it to appear as a meaningless jumble of symbols.

The word itself is elegant evidence of the problem it describes: 文字 (moji) means "character/letter" and 化け (bake) means "to transform" or "to turn into a ghost/monster."

How Mojibake Occurs

Mojibake happens when the encoding used to decode bytes differs from the encoding used to produce them. The bytes are correct, but the interpretation is wrong.

UTF-8 source → stored as UTF-8 bytes → read back as Latin-1
"café"  →  63 61 66 C3 A9  →  "café"

The bytes C3 A9 are the UTF-8 encoding of é (U+00E9). In Latin-1, C3 = Ã and A9 = ©. Result: café.

Classic Mojibake Patterns

Original → Mojibake (UTF-8 read as Latin-1 / Windows-1252)
é → é     (U+00E9 → C3 A9)
ü → ü     (U+00FC → C3 BC)
– → â€"    (U+2013 EN DASH → E2 80 93)
" → “   (U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK → E2 80 9C)
" → †     (U+201D RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK → E2 80 9D)
™ → â„¢    (U+2122 TRADE MARK SIGN → E2 84 A2)

Original → Mojibake (Shift-JIS read as UTF-8)
"日本語" → various errors or replacement chars

Detecting and Fixing Mojibake in Python

# Common pattern: UTF-8 bytes decoded as Latin-1, then re-encoded
mangled = "café"  # UTF-8 decoded as Latin-1

# Fix: re-encode as Latin-1, then decode as UTF-8
fixed = mangled.encode("latin-1").decode("utf-8")
print(fixed)  # "café"

# For Windows-1252 mojibake
windows_mangled = "caf\u00c3\u00a9"  # Windows-1252 misread
fixed2 = windows_mangled.encode("windows-1252").decode("utf-8")

# ftfy library: automatically fixes most common mojibake
import ftfy  # pip install ftfy
ftfy.fix_text("“Hello worldâ€")  # '"Hello world"'
ftfy.fix_text("café")             # "café"
ftfy.fix_text("日本語")            # unchanged (already correct)

Database Mojibake

A common scenario: a MySQL database set to latin1 connection charset, receiving UTF-8 data:

-- MySQL: wrong connection charset
SET NAMES latin1;  -- database thinks client sends Latin-1
-- Insert UTF-8 encoded bytes...
-- Each UTF-8 multi-byte sequence stored as multiple Latin-1 chars

-- Query shows mojibake:
SELECT name FROM users;  -- "café"

-- Fix: database actually stores UTF-8 bytes, just needs correct charset
SET NAMES utf8mb4;
SELECT name FROM users;  -- "café"

Prevention

1. Use UTF-8 everywhere: source code, database connection, HTTP headers, file I/O.
2. Declare encoding explicitly: HTTP Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8, HTML <meta charset="UTF-8">, MySQL CHARSET=utf8mb4.
3. Validate at boundaries: decode input bytes at the first opportunity; encode output bytes at the last moment.
4. Test with non-ASCII content: include accented characters and CJK in test data.

Mojibake in Different Contexts

Quick Facts