UTF-8 Decode

Decoding UTF-8 means turning a list of bytes back into the characters they stand for. You might have the bytes from a hex dump, a log file, a URL, a debugger or a program that printed a byte array.

1. Paste the bytes into the box. Spaces, commas, colons and brackets between them are fine.
2. The tool works out the format and shows it on the Auto chip. If it guessed wrong (65 66 67 could be hex or decimal), click the right format.
3. Read or copy the text. If some bytes aren't valid UTF-8, the tool says which ones and why, and can show the rest with � in their place.

A code point such as U+00E9 is not a byte dump; it is the character’s Unicode number. To see its bytes, use the UTF-8 Converter and type the character. For Base64, first turn it into hex with the Base64 to Hex converter, then paste the hex here.

Garbled text (sometimes called mojibake) happens when UTF-8 bytes are read as Windows-1252 or Latin-1, which use one byte per character. The two bytes of é, C3 A9, show up as the two characters à and ©. Paste the garbled text and the tool reverses the mix-up; it also handles text garbled twice, like ’.

Fixing the copy you have is a stopgap. The lasting fix is to make the program that shows it read the file as UTF-8, for example by adding <meta charset="utf-8"> to a web page or choosing UTF-8 when importing a CSV.

The � symbol (U+FFFD, the replacement character) is what browsers and most programs put where bytes couldn't be decoded. Once text has been saved with � in it, the original bytes are gone, so go back to the source rather than trying to repair the � characters.

// JavaScript
const bytes = Uint8Array.from('43 61 66 C3 A9'.split(' '), (h) => parseInt(h, 16));
new TextDecoder().decode(bytes);                        // "Café"

# Python
bytes.fromhex('43 61 66 C3 A9').decode('utf-8')         # 'Café'
'Café'.encode('cp1252').decode('utf-8')               # 'Café' (fixes garbled text)

// PHP
hex2bin(str_replace(' ', '', '43 61 66 C3 A9'));        // "Café"

// C#
Encoding.UTF8.GetString(Convert.FromHexString("436166C3A9"));   // "Café"

// Java 17+
new String(HexFormat.ofDelimiter(" ").parseHex("43 61 66 c3 a9"), StandardCharsets.UTF_8);

They treat bad bytes differently. Python stops with a UnicodeDecodeError. JavaScript, C# and Java quietly put � in their place; use new TextDecoder('utf-8', { fatal: true }) in JavaScript or new UTF8Encoding(false, true) in C# to get an error instead. PHP’s hex2bin doesn’t check at all, so test the result with mb_check_encoding($text, 'UTF-8').