misencoded

Misencoded is an adjective used to describe data or text that has been encoded using an incorrect or incompatible character encoding, resulting in garbled output, misinterpreted symbols, or unusable data. The term is commonly applied in computing, digital communication, and data processing, where information passes through multiple systems that may use different encodings. A related concept is mojibake, the garbled text produced when text is decoded with the wrong encoding.

Causes of misencoding include mismatches between sender and receiver encodings, missing or incorrect encoding declarations, and improper transcoding between encodings. Other factors are data corruption, double-encoding (encoding already-encoded data), and legacy systems that preserve old character sets. In practice, misencoded text often appears as strange symbols or sequences such as characters like é or �, which arise when UTF-8 bytes are interpreted as a different encoding (for example, Latin-1 or Windows-1252). URLs and text transmitted over email or form data can suffer from similar issues when encoding is not preserved end to end.

Impact of misencoding ranges from degraded readability and user experience to data integrity problems and search or indexing failures. In software development and data management, misencoding can hinder localization, accessibility, and interoperability between components.

Prevention and remediation emphasize consistent use of Unicode, preferably UTF-8, across all components of a system. It is important to declare and preserve the encoding in content types, headers, and storage, avoid double-encoding, and validate data at boundaries. When misencoding is detected, re-encode or transcode the data correctly, and employ robust libraries and testing to ensure round-trip encoding integrity.