Encoding Detector

Identify the character encoding of a text file or raw byte sequence — UTF-8, UTF-16 LE/BE, UTF-32, US-ASCII, Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1, GBK/GB18030, Big5, Shift-JIS, EUC-KR and EUC-JP — complete with BOM detection and a ranked list of candidates. This page is the fully local, browser-only version of the old Online File Encoding Converter (which detected encodings on a server); here every byte is inspected on your own machine. Byte order marks, strict UTF-8 validation and replacement-character statistics do the heavy lifting — nothing is ever uploaded.
Also see the Chinese Mojibake Fixer when text shows as garbled characters.
Input: Text you can already read has been decoded by the browser — feed it the original bytes instead (file, or hex).
File to Inspect
Click to choose a file or drag & drop it here
Detection Result
How detection works (and its honest limits): a byte order mark (BOM) decides UTF-8 / UTF-16 / UTF-32 outright; otherwise the bytes are checked against strict UTF-8 rules, then a UTF-16 layout heuristic (NUL placement for ASCII-like text), and finally every candidate is decoded with the browser’s native TextDecoder — the encoding whose decode produces the fewest U+FFFD replacement characters ranks highest. GBK, Big5, Shift-JIS and EUC-KR are all single- and multi-byte encodings that can be mistaken for each other when there is no BOM, so the page shows candidates with confidence instead of guessing. Purely binary data is reported as “not decodable text”. Decoding itself is never lossy here — it only reports.