Mojibakegarbled

Mojibakegarbled is the state of text that has become garbled as a result of mojibake, the misinterpretation of a text's byte sequence when decoded with an incorrect character encoding. It occurs when data encoded in one character set is decoded using another, producing unreadable glyphs or replacement characters rather than the intended text.

Causes of mojibakegarbled include mismatched encoding declarations, incorrect HTTP headers, misconfigured databases, or data transferred between systems that do not share the same encoding. While any non‑ASCII text can be affected, scripts that rely on multibyte encodings—such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean—are particularly prone to mojibake.

Symptoms manifest as sequences of replacement characters (often shown as boxes or question marks) or garbled letters that bear little apparent relation to the original. Common examples include misrendered accented characters or phrases that appear as nonsensical letter clusters.

Prevention and remediation focus on consistent encoding practice. Use a single encoding end-to-end, preferably UTF-8, and declare the charset in HTML, HTTP headers, and data files. Ensure databases, APIs, and log files store and retrieve text with the same encoding. When garbling occurs, identify the original encoding and convert or re-save the data with the correct encoding, using tools such as iconv or programming language libraries that handle character encodings.

Understanding mojibakegarbled helps preserve data integrity, searchability, and accessibility across multilingual content. See also Mojibake, character encoding, Unicode.