Product Code Database
Mojibake (; , 'character transformation') is the garbled or gibberish text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding. The result is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, often from a different writing system.
This display may include the generic replacement character in places where the binary code representation 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 (notably UTF-8 and UTF-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 the code point displayed in hexadecimal or using the generic replacement character. Importantly, these replacements are valid and are the result of correct error handling by the software.
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 are communication protocols that rely on settings on each computer rather than sending or storing metadata together with the data.
The differing default settings between computers are in part due to differing deployments of Unicode among operating system families, and partly the legacy encodings' specializations for different of human languages. Whereas Linux distributions mostly switched to UTF-8 in 2004, Microsoft Windows generally uses UTF-16, and sometimes uses 8-bit code pages for text files in different languages.
For some , such as Japanese script, several encodings have historically been employed, causing users to see mojibake relatively often. As an example, the word mojibake itself ("文字化け") stored as EUC-JP might be incorrectly displayed as , "ﾊｸｻ嵂ｽ､ｱ" (MS-932), or "ﾊｸｻ郾ｽ､ｱ" if interpreted as Shift-JIS, or as "ʸ»ú²½¤±" in software that assumes text to be in the Windows-1252 or ISO 8859-1 encodings, usually labelled Western or Western European. This is further exacerbated if other locales are involved: the same text stored as UTF-8 appears as if interpreted as Shift-JIS, as "æ–‡å—化ã‘" if interpreted as Western, or (for example) as "鏂囧瓧鍖栥亼" if interpreted as being in a GBK (Mainland China) locale.
| + Mojibake example |
The encoding of is affected by locale setting, which depends on the user's language and brand of operating system, among other conditions. Therefore, the assumed encoding is systematically wrong for files that come from a computer with a different setting, or even from a differently localized piece of software within the same system. For Unicode, one solution is to use a byte order mark, but many do not tolerate this for source code or other machine-readable text. Another solution is to store the encoding as metadata in the file system; file systems that support extended file attributes can store this as user.charset. This also requires support in software that wants to take advantage of it, but does not disturb other software.
While some encodings are easy to detect, such as UTF-8, there are many that are hard to distinguish (see charset detection). For example, a web browser may not be able to distinguish between a page coded in EUC-JP and another in Shift-JIS if the encoding is not assigned explicitly using HTTP headers sent along with the documents, or using the document's that are used to substitute for missing HTTP headers if the server cannot be configured to send the proper HTTP headers; see character encodings in HTML.
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 are and . Modern browsers and word processors often support a wide array of character encodings. Browsers often allow a user to change their Browser engine encoding setting on the fly, while word processors allow the user to select the appropriate encoding when opening a file. It may take some trial and error for 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. In Windows XP or later, a user also has the option to use Microsoft 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 as Windows 98; to resolve this issue on earlier operating systems, a user would have to use third party font rendering applications.
Similarly, the right single quotation mark (’), when encoded in UTF-8 and decoded using Windows-1252, becomes ’, ’, ’, and so on.
In older eras, some computers had vendor-specific encodings which caused mismatch also for English text. Commodore brand 8-bit computers used PETSCII encoding, particularly notable for inverting the upper and lower case compared to standard ASCII. PETSCII printers worked fine on other computers of the era, but inverted the case of all letters. IBM mainframes use the EBCDIC encoding which does not match ASCII at all.
These are languages for which the ISO 8859-1 character set (also known as Latin 1 or Western) has been in use. However, ISO 8859-1 has been obsoleted by two competing standards, the backward compatible Windows-1252, and the slightly altered ISO 8859-15. Both add the Euro 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 used currency sign (¤). However, with the advent of UTF-8, mojibake has become more common in certain scenarios, e.g. exchange of text files between UNIX and Windows computers, 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 mixing 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 word kärlek ("love") when it is encoded in UTF-8 but decoded in Western, producing "kärlek", or für in 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 like hääyö ("wedding night") which can make corrupted text very hard to read (e.g. hääyö appears as "hääyö"). Icelandic has ten possibly confounding characters, and Faroese has eight, making many words almost completely unintelligible when corrupted (e.g. Icelandic þjóðlöð, "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 when umlauts are not available. The latter practice seems to be better tolerated in the German language sphere than in the Nordic 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 player Ole Gunnar Solskjær had his last name spelled "SOLSKJAER" on his uniform when he played for Manchester United.
An artifact of UTF-8 misinterpreted as ISO 8859-1, "Ring meg nå" being rendered as "Ring meg nÃ¥", was seen in 2014 in an SMS scam targeting Norway.
| Smörgås (open sandwich) |
| Smrgs |
| Smrgs |
| Smrgs |
| Smrgs |
The same problem occurs also in Romanian, see these examples:
| Cenușă (ash) |
| UTF-8 |
| Cenu |
| Cenu |
| Cenu |
| Cenu |
| Cenu |
| ÁRVÍZTŰRŐ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép |
The situation began to improve when, after pressure from academic and user groups, ISO 8859-2 succeeded 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 as krzaczki (, lit. "little shrubs").
Meanwhile, in the West, Code page 866 supported Ukrainian and Belarusian, as well as Russian and Bulgarian in MS-DOS. For Microsoft Windows, Code Page 1251 added support for Serbian and other Slavic variants of Cyrillic.
Most recently, the Unicode encoding includes for 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 unreadable gibberish whose 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 alphabet, or using the default ("Western") encoding, typically results in text that consists almost entirely of capitalized vowels with diacritical marks (e.g. KOI8 "italic=unset" (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 an estimated 0.35% of all web pages worldwideall languages includedare 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 called majmunica (italic=unset), meaning "monkey's alphabet". In Serbian language, it is called đubre (ђубре), meaning "waste". 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 own MIK encoding, which is superficially similar to, albeit although incompatible with, CP866.
| + Example |
| italic=unset |
| йПЮЙНГЪАПШ |
| лТБЛПЪСВТЩ |
| ëÒÁËÏÚÑÂÒÙ |
| Çá ÆÖóÞ¢áñ |
| Êðàêîçÿáðû |
| КракозÑбры |
| п я─п╟п╨п╬п╥я▐п╠я─я▀ (The second character is a non-breaking space) |
| лџЛђл░л║лЙлиЛЈл▒ЛђЛІ |
| Кракозябры |
| –Ъ—А–∞–Ї–Њ–Ј—П–±—А—Л |
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.
The Windows-1252 encoding 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 to differentiate Croatian from Serbian, Bosnian from Croatian and Serbian, and now even Montenegrin from 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 (for Macedonian and partially Serbian language), the problem is similar to other Cyrillic-based scripts.
Newer versions of English Windows allow the code page to 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-left SBCS code pages including 1250, but only at install time.
| Trăm năm trong cõi người ta 𤾓𢆥𥪞𡎝𠊛些 ( Truyện Kiều, Nguyễn Du) | ||
| UTF-8 | Windows-1258 | Trm nm trong ci ngi ta |
| TCVN3 | Trm nm trong ci ngi ta | |
| VNI (Windows) | Trm nm trong ci ngi ta | |
| Mac Roman | Trm nm trong ci ngi ta |
| このメールは皆様へのメッセージです。 |
| UTF-8 |
| ���̃��(�q���Y�_�C�G�b�g) |
| �����＜�若������罕��吾���＜���祉�若�吾�с���� |
| 縺薙�繝｡繝ｼ繝ｫ縺ｯ逧�ｧ倥∈縺ｮ繝｡繝�そ繝ｼ繧ｸ縺ｧ縺吶� |
| كك�ك�ك�ك�ك�هن�ك�ك�ك�كك؛ك�ك�ك�كك |
| ã“ã®ãƒ¡ãƒ¼ãƒ«ã¯çš†æ§˜ã¸ã®ãƒ¡ãƒƒã‚»ãƒ¼ã‚¸ã§ã™ã€‚ |
| ¤³¤Î¥á¡¼¥ë¤Ï³§ÍͤؤΥá¥Ã¥»¡¼¥¸¤Ç¤¹¡£ |
| ‚±‚̃[ƒ‹‚ÍŠF—l‚ւ̃ƒbƒZ[ƒW‚Å‚·B |
It is relatively easy to identify the original encoding when luànmǎ occurs in Guobiao encodings:
| 三國志曹操傳 | Big5 | GB | T瓣в变巨肚 | Garbled characters with almost no hint of original meaning. The red character is not a valid codepoint in . |
| 文字化けテスト | Shift-JIS | 暥帤壔偗僥僗僩 | Kana is displayed as characters with the 亻 () 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 亻 characters. | |
| 디제이맥스 테크니카 | EUC-KR | 叼力捞钙胶 抛农聪墨 | Random simplified characters which 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:
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.
One example of this is the old Wikipedia 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 the Devanagari character for "wi" instead used to display the "wa" character followed by an unpaired "i" diacritic vowel, easily recognizable as mojibake generated by a computer not configured to display Indic text. The logo as redesigned has 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 the Marathi 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 notably Lao script, were not officially supported by Windows XP until the release of Windows Vista. However, various sites have made free-to-download fonts.
Due to these ad hoc encodings, 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.
(Universal Declaration of Human Rights) |
| الإعلان العالمى لحقوق الإنسان |
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