Kodingsfeil

Kodingsfeil, or encoding error, refers to the incorrect interpretation of text due to a mismatch between the character encoding used to store data and the encoding used to read it. This mismatch often produces garbled or unreadable characters, a phenomenon commonly known as mojibake. Kodingsfeil can affect any system that processes text, including documents, emails, websites, and databases.

Common causes include misdeclared or inconsistent encodings across systems, data transfers between different platforms, or the use of legacy encodings that do not cover the full range of characters in use. Problems can also arise when bytes are mishandled during conversion, or when multi-byte characters are truncated or split incorrectly. In some cases, only part of a text is readable while the rest appears as strange symbols or replacement characters.

Examples frequently seen in practice include UTF-8 data decoded as ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252, resulting in sequences like ö or  appearing in place of Swedish or Norwegian characters. Another issue is the absence of a clear encoding declaration in web pages or APIs, causing clients to guess and often misinterpret the data.

Prevention and remediation focus on standardization and verification. The recommended approach is to use a universal encoding such as UTF-8, declare the encoding explicitly in all data workflows (HTTP headers, HTML meta tags, APIs), and ensure consistent handling across storage, transmission, and display layers. When legacy data exists, convert it to the chosen encoding and validate round-trip encoding/decoding to minimize future kodingsfeil.