How to Fix a CSV File's Encoding
- Choose or drag in the CSV file. Its encoding and delimiter are detected from the first part of the file.
- Look at the preview. If letters still look wrong, change the Encoding under Advanced Options until they look right.
- Pick the delimiter you want in the result and whether Excel will open it (keep the BOM ticked if so).
- Press Convert File and download the fixed CSV.
Which Garbled Characters Mean What
| You see | Should be | What happened | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
Café | Café | UTF-8 file read as Windows-1252 | Convert with BOM ticked |
don’t | don’t | UTF-8 curly apostrophe read as Windows-1252 | Convert with BOM ticked |
M�nchen | München | Windows-1252 file read as UTF-8 | Convert (encoding detected automatically) |
| Everything in column A | Separate columns | Delimiter does not match Excel's regional setting | Change the delimiter |
If you see é and the file has already been saved again by another program, the damage may be written into the file itself, and converting will faithfully keep é. In that case go back to the original export if you can.
Why CSV Encoding Goes Wrong So Often
A CSV file is plain text and has no place to say which character encoding it uses. Most modern systems write UTF-8, which can store every language. Excel on Windows, when it opens a CSV by double-click, assumes the older encoding of your Windows region unless the file starts with a UTF-8 byte order mark. Many exports from web apps, databases and Google Sheets do not include one, so accented letters, curly quotes and currency symbols come out garbled.
Delimiters have a similar history. In regions where the decimal separator is a comma, spreadsheet programs save and expect semicolons, so a CSV from a US system opens as a single column in a German or French Excel, and a CSV from a European Excel confuses US software.
What This Converter Changes, and What It Doesn't
The result is always UTF-8. When you keep the same delimiter, each row's text is copied as it is, so quoting and values like 00742 do not change. When you change the delimiter, values are re-quoted only where needed. Line endings can be kept, or set to Windows (CRLF) or Mac and Linux (LF). The file is processed in small chunks on your own computer, so large files are converted without being uploaded.
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