Encoding Converter

📖 Tool Introduction

Encoding Converter is a free online tool built for anyone fighting garbled text. When you open a file from a legacy system, an overseas website, or a colleague across the Pacific, you often see a wall of question marks and tofu boxes, which almost always means the file's real encoding does not match what your viewer expects. This tool leverages the browser's built-in TextDecoder to read files as UTF-8, GBK/GB18030, Big5, UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE, Shift_JIS, EUC-KR, Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1, and shows the decoded text live in a preview area. Once the preview looks correct, you choose a target encoding (UTF-8, UTF-8 with BOM, UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE) and export a fresh file that opens cleanly in any editor. It is important to understand one browser limitation: modern engines only allow re-encoding text into UTF-8 or UTF-16, so GBK, Big5 and similar codecs are supported for reading only. The tool states this restriction clearly in the interface so you never expect an export the engine cannot produce. All decoding and encoding happen inside your browser's memory, so a file never touches a server, which keeps sensitive contracts, reports and source code confidential. The preview updates the instant you change the source encoding, so you can cycle through candidates in seconds until the text renders properly. The UTF-16 writers prepend a byte-order mark automatically, which helps legacy Windows tools detect the encoding without prompting. Because the whole workflow is offline, the converter also works on locked-down intranets and very slow connections, and it never throttles on large uploads since nothing is transmitted. Whether you recover a garbled export from a database, normalize a CSV for a spreadsheet, or prepare a subtitle file for an older media player, the conversion takes only a few clicks. The live preview is the real time-saver: instead of guessing the source codec and exporting blindly, you cycle through candidates while watching the decoded text, so you lock onto the right encoding in seconds rather than by repeated trial and error. A built-in sample loads a short multilingual string the moment you click the example button, letting you immediately switch the target encoding and feel the round-trip without preparing your own file. The whole workflow needs no upload, no account and no installation, which makes the converter a dependable companion on locked-down machines, shared terminals and very slow connections alike.

✨ Key Features

• Wide decode support: UTF-8, GBK, Big5, UTF-16, Shift_JIS, EUC-KR and more
• Live preview: switch source encoding and the decoded text refreshes instantly
• Multiple targets: UTF-8, UTF-8 BOM, UTF-16LE and UTF-16BE
• Auto BOM: UTF-16 exports carry a byte-order mark for other programs
• Local memory only: files never reach a server, keeping data private
• Large friendly: handles text files up to about 25MB without upload

📝 How to Use

1. Drop the garbled file into the dashed box, or click to choose it
2. Cycle through the source encoding options until the preview is clean
3. Pick the desired target encoding in the right-hand dropdown
4. Click Convert & Download to save the new file
5. Click Copy text if you only need the decoded string in your clipboard

⚠️ Notes

• Detection manual: the tool does not guess; choose the source encoding yourself
• Export limit: only UTF-8 and UTF-16 can be written; GBK/Big5 are decode-only
• File size: each file is capped near 25MB; split bigger files first
• Fault tolerant: invalid bytes render as replacement characters without aborting
• Offline: fully local, works on slow networks and air-gapped machines