UTF-8 Encoder & Decoder
View UTF-8 byte sequences or recover text from bytes. Debug mojibake and i18n—free online, copy paste, no upload.
About UTF-8 Encoder/Decoder
UTF-8 encodes Unicode characters as variable-length byte sequences. When apps show “é” instead of “é”, you are usually looking at UTF-8 bytes misread as Latin-1—this tool helps inspect the real bytes.
How to Use UTF-8 Encoder/Decoder
Paste text to see UTF-8 code units/bytes. Paste byte notation to recover characters when possible. Compare output with your database or API charset settings.
When to Use UTF-8 Encoder/Decoder
i18n QA: Verify emoji and accents survive API round trips. Database migrations: Confirm column charset matches app encoding. Log forensics: Interpret byte columns in support tickets.
Why Use This UTF-8 Encoder/Decoder?
Visualizing bytes beats guessing which charset went wrong.
Unicode vs HTML formatting
Hex shows raw bytes. UTF-8 tool focuses on character ↔ byte relationships for international text debugging.
Platform compatibility
Use when APIs declare charset=utf-8 but logs show garbled accents. Pair with URL decoder when errors involve % sequences.
Examples
- é → UTF-8 bytes C3 A9
- Hello 世界 — mixed ASCII and CJK
- 😀 — mojibake hint (investigate wrong decode)
Frequently asked questions
UTF-8 vs UTF-16?
UTF-8 dominates the web. UTF-16 appears in some Windows APIs—match your platform docs.
Why emoji break in old systems?
Emoji need 4-byte UTF-8 sequences; legacy UTF-8 columns truncated to 3 bytes may fail.