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Character Encoder / Decoder Tool

This is an encoding / decoding tool that lets you simulate character encoding problems and errors.

Here, you can simulate what happens if you encode a text file with one encoding and then decode the text with a different encoding. Try e.g. to encode the Swedish characters åäö with utf-8 and then decode them with iso-8859-1, or try to encode 明伯 (simplified Chinese meaning 'to understand') with utf-8 and decode with GB 18030. That will yield the characters: 鏄庝集, which I really can't understand.

Enter a string to encode / decode

Encode with:
Decode with:

The encoded / decoded string:

Encoding from Unicode (UTF-8) (code page 65001, utf-8) to Western European (ISO) (code page 28591, iso-8859-1)

What Is A Code Page?

Code page is another name for character encoding. It consists of a table of values that describes the character set for a particular language.

What Is character encoding?

Character encoding is the process of encoding a collection of characters according to an encoding system. This process normally pairs numbers with characters to encode information that can be used by a computer.

Why do we need to encode characters?

Due to computers only being able to interpret raw zero’s and one’s (ex. 01100110), words and sentences need to be encoded when inputting information to a computer. The characters within these words and sentences are grouped into a character set that the computer can recognize.

What are character encodings?

Character encodings allow us to understand the encoding that is taking place with computers. Due to there being a variety of character encodings, errors can spring up when encoded with one character encoding and decoding with another. The above tool can be used to simulate if any errors will come up when encoding with any character encoding and decoding with another.

Types of character encodings

There is a wide variety of encodings that can be used to encode or decode a string of characters, including UTF-8, ASCII, and ISO 9959-1.

Examples of popular character encodings:

ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Exchange
ANSI: American National Standards Institute
Unicode (internal text codes used by operating systems)
UTF -8 (Unicode Transformation Format that uses 1 byte to represent characters)
UTF-16 (Unicode Transformation Format that uses 2 bytes to represent characters)
UTF-32 (Unicode Transformation Format that uses 4 bytes to represent characters)

While these are certainly popular encodings that are used, there are times when strings of code are encoded with encodings that aren’t as widely used, such as x-IA5-Norgwegian or DOS-720. This can cause confusion and possible errors, so it’s important to understand how to reduce these errors by simulating beforehand using String Functions’ character encoding/decoding tool.

How to use the character encoding/decoding tool

To use String Functions’ character encoding/decoding tool, start by entering a string of characters in the text box. Then, select which encoding and decoding system you would like to use to simulate from the drop-down menus.

View our character encoding index

To view encoding tables from one encoding to another, use our character encoding table index.