How to Fix Garbled Text — Repair Broken UTF-8 / CP949 Korean Encoding
Jun 21, 2026
Ever opened a text file, CSV, or subtitle (.srt) and seen Korean show up garbled like �□¿½? This is a common problem caused when the encoding the file was created in (UTF-8, EUC-KR/CP949, etc.) doesn't match the setting of the program opening it. This article explains how to restore garbled Korean to normal.
Upload a garbled text file and it auto-detects the encoding and restores it so it displays correctly.
Fix garbled text →Why it breaks — encoding at a glance
- UTF-8 — Today's standard. Used by most of the web and most programs.
- EUC-KR / CP949 — The Korean encoding commonly used in old Windows Notepad and Excel CSV files.
- When you open a UTF-8 file as CP949, or vice versa, only the Korean appears garbled.
How to fix — two steps
- Upload the file — Upload a garbled .txt, .csv, .srt, or similar file to Fix garbled text.
- Get the fixed copy — It auto-detects the encoding, shows the correctly read content, and lets you save and download it as UTF-8.
When you'll use it
- When a CSV from a business partner shows garbled Korean in Excel.
- When an old Notepad document or a downloaded subtitle file is garbled.
- When tidying up text with mixed encodings during development.
Tools worth pairing
For tabular data, try CSV ↔ JSON conversion; to check character and byte counts, the character counter; and when you need special characters, the special characters & emoji picker.
Frequently asked questions
Q. Which files are supported?
Any plain text file such as txt, csv, or srt. It auto-detects the encoding and repairs it.
Q. Will it always be recoverable?
If the original was saved in a single encoding, it can usually be restored. If multiple encodings are mixed, some characters may have limits.
Q. Is my file transmitted anywhere?
It's used only for processing, and nothing beyond the result is kept.