File Encoding Detector (UTF-8, UTF-16, BOM)
Upload any file; the tool sniffs its encoding via BOM detection, byte pattern analysis, and validity checks. Useful for diagnosing "weird characters" issues or confirming a CSV/log file is UTF-8 before importing.
How to use the File Encoding Detector (UTF-8, UTF-16, BOM)
Upload a file (up to about 5 MB). The tool inspects it for a byte-order mark, analyses its byte patterns, and runs validity checks to report the most likely encoding — UTF-8, UTF-16 BE/LE, ASCII, or Latin-1.
Working out what encoding a file uses
A text file is just bytes; the encoding is the convention that maps those bytes to characters, and it is not stored anywhere inside the file. Guess wrong and you get mojibake — café turns into café. The classic “weird characters” bug almost always traces back to an encoding mismatch at import time.
Upload a file and this detector looks for a byte-order mark, analyses byte patterns, and validates the bytes against each candidate to report the most likely encoding. Run it before importing a CSV or log to confirm it is UTF-8. To validate a specific byte sequence as UTF-8, use the UTF-8 validator; to fix line endings once you know the encoding, the line ending converter.
Common use cases
- Import prep — confirm a CSV is UTF-8 before loading it into a database.
- Mojibake diagnosis — find the real encoding behind garbled characters.
- BOM detection — see whether a file carries a UTF-8 or UTF-16 byte-order mark.
- Legacy data — tell ASCII from Latin-1 in an old export.
- Pipeline checks — verify files match the encoding your tooling expects.