Ðâ´ã‘€ãâ¾ãâ·ãâ´ãâ¾ãâ²ãâ°, Ñ‚.ã‘å½., Read and Speak English Workbook. Ñâãâ¿ãâ±, Anthology, 2004

Garbled text equally a upshot of incorrect character encoding

Mojibake ( 文字化け ; IPA: [mod͡ʑibake]) is the garbled text that is the consequence of text being decoded using an unintended grapheme encoding.^[1] The outcome is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, often from a different writing organization.

This display may include the generic replacement character ("�") in places where the binary representation is considered invalid. A replacement can likewise involve multiple consecutive symbols, as viewed in ane encoding, when the same binary lawmaking constitutes ane symbol in the other encoding. This is either because of differing abiding length encoding (as in Asian sixteen-bit encodings vs European viii-bit encodings), or the utilise of variable length encodings (notably UTF-8 and UTF-16).

Failed rendering of glyphs due to either missing fonts or missing glyphs in a font is a different issue that is not to be confused with mojibake. Symptoms of this failed rendering include blocks with the lawmaking point displayed in hexadecimal or using the generic replacement character. Importantly, these replacements are valid and are the result of correct error handling by the software.

Etymology [edit]

Mojibake ways "character transformation" in Japanese. The word is equanimous of 文字 (moji, IPA: [mod͡ʑi]), "character" and 化け (broil, IPA: [bäke̞], pronounced "bah-keh"), "transform".

Causes [edit]

To correctly reproduce the original text that was encoded, the correspondence between the encoded data and the notion of its encoding must be preserved. Every bit mojibake is the instance of non-compliance betwixt these, it can exist achieved by manipulating the data itself, or just relabeling it.

Mojibake is ofttimes seen with text data that take been tagged with a incorrect encoding; it may non even exist tagged at all, but moved between computers with dissimilar default encodings. A major source of trouble are communication protocols that rely on settings on each computer rather than sending or storing metadata together with the data.

The differing default settings between computers are in office due to differing deployments of Unicode amid operating organisation families, and partly the legacy encodings' specializations for different writing systems of human being languages. Whereas Linux distributions more often than not switched to UTF-8 in 2004,^[2] Microsoft Windows generally uses UTF-xvi, and sometimes uses viii-chip lawmaking pages for text files in unlike languages.^{[ dubious – hash out ]}

For some writing systems, an example being Japanese, several encodings have historically been employed, causing users to encounter mojibake relatively frequently. Every bit a Japanese instance, the word mojibake "文字化け" stored equally EUC-JP might be incorrectly displayed every bit "ﾊｸｻ�ｽ､ｱ", "ﾊｸｻ嵂ｽ､ｱ" (MS-932), or "ﾊｸｻ郾ｽ､ｱ" (Shift JIS-2004). The same text stored every bit UTF-viii is displayed as "譁�蟄怜喧縺�" if interpreted as Shift JIS. This is further exacerbated if other locales are involved: the same UTF-8 text appears as "文字化ã'" in software that assumes text to be in the Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 encodings, usually labelled Western, or (for instance) every bit "鏂囧瓧鍖栥亼" if interpreted as being in a GBK (Mainland China) locale.

Mojibake instance

Original text	文		字		化		け
Raw bytes of EUC-JP encoding	CA	B8	BB	FA	B2	BD	A4	B1
Bytes interpreted as Shift-JIS encoding	ﾊ	ｸ	ｻ	郾		ｽ	､	ｱ
Bytes interpreted as ISO-8859-1 encoding	Ê	¸	»	ú	²	½	¤	±
Bytes interpreted as GBK encoding	矢		机		步		け

Underspecification [edit]

If the encoding is not specified, it is up to the software to decide it by other means. Depending on the type of software, the typical solution is either configuration or charset detection heuristics. Both are prone to mis-prediction in non-then-uncommon scenarios.

The encoding of text files is affected by locale setting, which depends on the user's language, brand of operating system and mayhap other conditions. Therefore, the assumed encoding is systematically incorrect for files that come from a computer with a different setting, or even from a differently localized software inside the same organisation. For Unicode, one solution is to use a byte gild marking, but for source lawmaking and other car readable text, many parsers don't tolerate this. Some other is storing the encoding equally metadata in the file system. File systems that support extended file attributes can store this as user.charset.^[3] This also requires support in software that wants to take advantage of it, but does not disturb other software.

While a few encodings are like shooting fish in a barrel to notice, in detail UTF-8, in that location are many that are hard to distinguish (see charset detection). A spider web browser may not exist able to distinguish a page coded in EUC-JP and another in Shift-JIS if the coding scheme is not assigned explicitly using HTTP headers sent along with the documents, or using the HTML certificate's meta tags that are used to substitute for missing HTTP headers if the server cannot be configured to send the proper HTTP headers; see character encodings in HTML.

Mis-specification [edit]

Mojibake also occurs when the encoding is wrongly specified. This often happens between encodings that are similar. For example, the Eudora e-mail client for Windows was known to send emails labelled equally ISO-8859-ane that were in reality Windows-1252.^[4] The Mac OS version of Eudora did not exhibit this behaviour. Windows-1252 contains extra printable characters in the C1 range (the most ofttimes seen being curved quotation marks and actress dashes), that were not displayed properly in software complying with the ISO standard; this peculiarly affected software running under other operating systems such as Unix.

Human ignorance [edit]

Of the encodings yet in employ, many are partially uniform with each other, with ASCII every bit the predominant common subset. This sets the phase for man ignorance:

• Compatibility tin be a deceptive property, every bit the mutual subset of characters is unaffected by a mixup of two encodings (see Problems in different writing systems).
• People recall they are using ASCII, and tend to label whatever superset of ASCII they actually utilize equally "ASCII". Maybe for simplification, but even in academic literature, the word "ASCII" can exist found used as an example of something not compatible with Unicode, where apparently "ASCII" is Windows-1252 and "Unicode" is UTF-8.^[i] Note that UTF-8 is backwards uniform with ASCII.

Overspecification [edit]

When at that place are layers of protocols, each trying to specify the encoding based on different information, the to the lowest degree sure information may be misleading to the recipient. For example, consider a spider web server serving a static HTML file over HTTP. The character set may be communicated to the customer in any number of 3 ways:

• in the HTTP header. This information can exist based on server configuration (for instance, when serving a file off disk) or controlled past the application running on the server (for dynamic websites).
• in the file, every bit an HTML meta tag (http-equiv or charset) or the encoding attribute of an XML proclamation. This is the encoding that the author meant to save the item file in.
• in the file, every bit a byte order mark. This is the encoding that the author'due south editor actually saved it in. Unless an adventitious encoding conversion has happened (by opening information technology in one encoding and saving it in another), this will be correct. Information technology is, nonetheless, but bachelor in Unicode encodings such every bit UTF-viii or UTF-16.

Lack of hardware or software back up [edit]

Much older hardware is typically designed to support only ane grapheme set and the character set typically cannot exist altered. The character table contained within the display firmware will be localized to have characters for the country the device is to be sold in, and typically the tabular array differs from country to country. As such, these systems volition potentially display mojibake when loading text generated on a organisation from a dissimilar country. As well, many early operating systems do non support multiple encoding formats and thus will stop up displaying mojibake if fabricated to display non-standard text—early versions of Microsoft Windows and Palm OS for example, are localized on a per-land ground and will only back up encoding standards relevant to the country the localized version will be sold in, and will display mojibake if a file containing a text in a different encoding format from the version that the Bone is designed to support is opened.

Resolutions [edit]

Applications using UTF-eight as a default encoding may accomplish a greater degree of interoperability because of its widespread utilise and backward compatibility with Usa-ASCII. UTF-8 as well has the ability to be directly recognised by a simple algorithm, so that well written software should be able to avoid mixing UTF-8 up with other encodings.

The difficulty of resolving an instance of mojibake varies depending on the application within which it occurs and the causes of it. Ii of the most mutual applications in which mojibake may occur are web browsers and give-and-take processors. Modern browsers and give-and-take processors oftentimes back up a wide array of character encodings. Browsers oft allow a user to change their rendering engine'due south encoding setting on the fly, while word processors permit the user to select the appropriate encoding when opening a file. It may take some trial and error for users to find the right encoding.

The trouble gets more complicated when it occurs in an application that normally does non support a broad range of character encoding, such as in a non-Unicode computer game. In this example, the user must change the operating system's encoding settings to match that of the game. Yet, changing the system-wide encoding settings tin can also cause Mojibake in pre-existing applications. In Windows XP or subsequently, a user also has the option to use Microsoft AppLocale, an application that allows the irresolute of per-application locale settings. Even and then, changing the operating system encoding settings is non possible on earlier operating systems such as Windows 98; to resolve this effect on before operating systems, a user would have to use 3rd party font rendering applications.

Problems in different writing systems [edit]

English [edit]

Mojibake in English language texts generally occurs in punctuation, such every bit em dashes (—), en dashes (–), and curly quotes (",",','), but rarely in character text, since near encodings hold with ASCII on the encoding of the English alphabet. For example, the pound sign "£" will announced as "£" if it was encoded past the sender as UTF-8 but interpreted by the recipient as CP1252 or ISO 8859-1. If iterated using CP1252, this can lead to "£", "£", "ÃÆ'‚£", etc.

Some computers did, in older eras, have vendor-specific encodings which caused mismatch also for English text. Commodore brand viii-scrap computers used PETSCII encoding, particularly notable for inverting the upper and lower case compared to standard ASCII. PETSCII printers worked fine on other computers of the era, simply flipped the case of all letters. IBM mainframes use the EBCDIC encoding which does non match ASCII at all.

Other Western European languages [edit]

The alphabets of the North Germanic languages, Catalan, Finnish, German, French, Portuguese and Castilian are all extensions of the Latin alphabet. The additional characters are typically the ones that become corrupted, making texts only mildly unreadable with mojibake:

• å, ä, ö in Finnish and Swedish
• à, ç, è, é, ï, í, ò, ó, ú, ü in Catalan
• æ, ø, å in Norwegian and Danish
• á, é, ó, ij, è, ë, ï in Dutch
• ä, ö, ü, and ß in German
• á, ð, í, ó, ú, ý, æ, ø in Faroese
• á, ð, é, í, ó, ú, ý, þ, æ, ö in Icelandic
• à, â, ç, è, é, ë, ê, ï, î, ô, ù, û, ü, ÿ, æ, œ in French
• à, è, é, ì, ò, ù in Italian
• á, é, í, ñ, ó, ú, ü, ¡, ¿ in Castilian
• à, á, â, ã, ç, é, ê, í, ó, ô, õ, ú in Portuguese (ü no longer used)
• á, é, í, ó, ú in Irish
• à, è, ì, ò, ù in Scottish Gaelic
• £ in British English

… and their uppercase counterparts, if applicative.

These are languages for which the ISO-8859-1 graphic symbol set (besides known as Latin 1 or Western) has been in use. However, ISO-8859-1 has been obsoleted by two competing standards, the astern uniform Windows-1252, and the slightly altered ISO-8859-fifteen. Both add the Euro sign € and the French œ, but otherwise any confusion of these three character sets does not create mojibake in these languages. Furthermore, it is always safe to translate ISO-8859-one as Windows-1252, and adequately safe to interpret it as ISO-8859-xv, in detail with respect to the Euro sign, which replaces the rarely used currency sign (¤). However, with the advent of UTF-eight, mojibake has get more than common in certain scenarios, eastward.chiliad. exchange of text files betwixt UNIX and Windows computers, due to UTF-8's incompatibility with Latin-1 and Windows-1252. But UTF-8 has the ability to be directly recognised by a elementary algorithm, so that well written software should be able to avert mixing UTF-8 up with other encodings, so this was most common when many had software not supporting UTF-8. Most of these languages were supported past MS-DOS default CP437 and other automobile default encodings, except ASCII, then problems when buying an operating system version were less common. Windows and MS-DOS are non uniform however.

In Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and High german, vowels are rarely repeated, and information technology is commonly obvious when i grapheme gets corrupted, e.g. the second letter of the alphabet in "kÃ⁠¤rlek" ( kärlek , "honey"). This mode, fifty-fifty though the reader has to estimate between å, ä and ö, almost all texts remain legible. Finnish text, on the other hand, does feature repeating vowels in words like hääyö ("wedding ceremony night") which can sometimes return text very difficult to read (e.g. hääyö appears as "hÃ⁠¤Ã⁠¤yÃ⁠¶"). Icelandic and Faroese have x and eight possibly confounding characters, respectively, which thus can make it more hard to guess corrupted characters; Icelandic words similar þjóðlöð ("outstanding hospitality") become most entirely unintelligible when rendered as "þjóðlöð".

In German, Buchstabensalat ("alphabetic character salad") is a common term for this phenomenon, and in Castilian, deformación (literally deformation).

Some users transliterate their writing when using a computer, either by omitting the problematic diacritics, or by using digraph replacements (å → aa, ä/æ → ae, ö/ø → oe, ü → ue etc.). Thus, an writer might write "ueber" instead of "über", which is standard practice in German language when umlauts are not bachelor. The latter exercise seems to be better tolerated in the German language language sphere than in the Nordic countries. For example, in Norwegian, digraphs are associated with archaic Danish, and may be used jokingly. However, digraphs are useful in communication with other parts of the earth. As an instance, the Norwegian football game thespian Ole Gunnar Solskjær had his name spelled "SOLSKJAER" on his dorsum when he played for Manchester United.

An artifact of UTF-viii misinterpreted as ISO-8859-1, "Ring meg nÃ¥" (" Ring meg nå "), was seen in an SMS scam raging in Norway in June 2014.^[5]

Examples

Swedish example:		Smörgås (open sandwich)
File encoding	Setting in browser	Result
MS-DOS 437	ISO 8859-1	Sm"rg†due south
ISO 8859-one	Mac Roman	SmˆrgÂs
UTF-8	ISO 8859-one	Smörgådue south
UTF-8	Mac Roman	Smörgådue south

Cardinal and Eastern European [edit]

Users of Fundamental and Eastern European languages can too exist affected. Considering most computers were not connected to any network during the mid- to belatedly-1980s, at that place were unlike graphic symbol encodings for every linguistic communication with diacritical characters (see ISO/IEC 8859 and KOI-eight), frequently too varying by operating system.

Hungarian [edit]

Hungarian is some other affected language, which uses the 26 bones English language characters, plus the accented forms á, é, í, ó, ú, ö, ü (all present in the Latin-i character set), plus the two characters ő and ű, which are not in Latin-one. These 2 characters can be correctly encoded in Latin-2, Windows-1250 and Unicode. Before Unicode became mutual in electronic mail clients, eastward-mails containing Hungarian text often had the letters ő and ű corrupted, sometimes to the indicate of unrecognizability. It is common to respond to an e-mail rendered unreadable (see examples below) by character mangling (referred to every bit "betűszemét", pregnant "letter garbage") with the phrase "Árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép", a nonsense phrase (literally "Flood-resistant mirror-drilling machine") containing all accented characters used in Hungarian.

Examples [edit]

Source encoding	Target encoding	Result	Occurrence
Hungarian instance		ÁRVÍZTŰRŐ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép	Characters in red are wrong and practice non match the top-left instance.
CP 852	CP 437	╡RV╓ZTδRè TÜKÖRFΘRαGÉP árvízt√rï tükörfúrógép	This was very mutual in DOS-era when the text was encoded by the Central European CP 852 encoding; nonetheless, the operating system, a software or printer used the default CP 437 encoding. Please notation that pocket-size-example letters are mainly correct, exception with ő (ï) and ű (√). Ü/ü is correct because CP 852 was made compatible with High german. Present occurs mainly on printed prescriptions and cheques.
CWI-2	CP 437	ÅRVìZTÿRº TÜKÖRFùRòGÉP árvíztûrô tükörfúrógép	The CWI-2 encoding was designed so that the text remains fairly well-readable even if the display or printer uses the default CP 437 encoding. This encoding was heavily used in the 1980s and early 1990s, only nowadays information technology is completely deprecated.
Windows-1250	Windows-1252	ÁRVÍZTÛRÕ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP árvíztûrõ tükörfúrógép	The default Western Windows encoding is used instead of the Key-European one. But ő-Ő (õ-Õ) and ű-Ű (û-Û) are incorrect, simply the text is completely readable. This is the most mutual fault present; due to ignorance, it occurs ofttimes on webpages or even in printed media.
CP 852	Windows-1250	µRVÖZTëRŠ TšOne thousand™RFéRŕThou P rvˇztűr‹ t yard"rfŁr˘g‚p	Central European Windows encoding is used instead of DOS encoding. The use of ű is correct.
Windows-1250	CP 852	┴RV═ZT█RŇ T▄KÍRF┌RËGrand╔P ßrvÝztűr§ tŘchiliad÷rf˙rˇgÚp	Central European DOS encoding is used instead of Windows encoding. The utilise of ű is correct.
Quoted-printable	seven-fleck ASCII	=C1RV=CDZT=DBR=D5 T=DC1000=D6RF=DAR=D3K=C9P =E1rv=EDzt=FBr=F5 t=FCk=F6rf=FAr=F3g=E9p	Mainly caused by wrongly configured mail servers simply may occur in SMS letters on some cell-phones every bit well.
UTF-8	Windows-1252	ÁRVÍZTÅ°RŐ TÃœKÖRFÚRÃ"1000ÉP árvÃztűrÅ' tügörfúrógép	Mainly acquired by wrongly configured web services or webmail clients, which were not tested for international usage (every bit the trouble remains curtained for English texts). In this case the bodily (often generated) content is in UTF-eight; yet, it is non configured in the HTML headers, so the rendering engine displays it with the default Western encoding.

Smooth [edit]

Prior to the creation of ISO 8859-two in 1987, users of various calculating platforms used their ain character encodings such as AmigaPL on Amiga, Atari Guild on Atari ST and Masovia, IBM CP852, Mazovia and Windows CP1250 on IBM PCs. Smoothen companies selling early DOS computers created their own mutually-incompatible ways to encode Polish characters and simply reprogrammed the EPROMs of the video cards (typically CGA, EGA, or Hercules) to provide hardware code pages with the needed glyphs for Smooth—arbitrarily located without reference to where other computer sellers had placed them.

The situation began to ameliorate when, later pressure from bookish and user groups, ISO 8859-ii succeeded every bit the "Cyberspace standard" with limited support of the dominant vendors' software (today largely replaced past Unicode). With the numerous problems caused by the diverseness of encodings, fifty-fifty today some users tend to refer to Polish diacritical characters as krzaczki ([kshach-kih], lit. "little shrubs").

Russian and other Cyrillic alphabets [edit]

Mojibake may exist colloquially called krakozyabry ( кракозя́бры [krɐkɐˈzʲæbrɪ̈]) in Russian, which was and remains complicated by several systems for encoding Cyrillic.^[6] The Soviet Union and early Russian federation developed KOI encodings ( Kod Obmena Informatsiey , Код Обмена Информацией , which translates to "Code for Data Exchange"). This began with Cyrillic-only 7-chip KOI7, based on ASCII only with Latin and some other characters replaced with Cyrillic letters. And so came viii-bit KOI8 encoding that is an ASCII extension which encodes Cyrillic letters only with loftier-scrap set octets respective to 7-bit codes from KOI7. It is for this reason that KOI8 text, even Russian, remains partially readable after stripping the eighth bit, which was considered as a major reward in the age of 8BITMIME-unaware email systems. For case, words " Школа русского языка " shkola russkogo yazyka , encoded in KOI8 and so passed through the high bit stripping procedure, end up rendered every bit "[KOLA RUSSKOGO qZYKA". Eventually KOI8 gained different flavors for Russian and Bulgarian (KOI8-R), Ukrainian (KOI8-U), Byelorussian (KOI8-RU) and even Tajik (KOI8-T).

Meanwhile, in the West, Lawmaking page 866 supported Ukrainian and Belarusian as well as Russian/Bulgarian in MS-DOS. For Microsoft Windows, Lawmaking Page 1251 added support for Serbian and other Slavic variants of Cyrillic.

Most recently, the Unicode encoding includes code points for practically all the characters of all the world's languages, including all Cyrillic characters.

Before Unicode, it was necessary to match text encoding with a font using the same encoding system. Failure to practice this produced unreadable gibberish whose specific appearance varied depending on the exact combination of text encoding and font encoding. For example, attempting to view non-Unicode Cyrillic text using a font that is limited to the Latin alphabet, or using the default ("Western") encoding, typically results in text that consists almost entirely of vowels with diacritical marks. (KOI8 " Библиотека " ( biblioteka , library) becomes "âÉÂÌÉÏÔÅËÁ".) Using Windows codepage 1251 to view text in KOI8 or vice versa results in garbled text that consists more often than not of capital letter letters (KOI8 and codepage 1251 share the same ASCII region, but KOI8 has uppercase letters in the region where codepage 1251 has lowercase, and vice versa). In full general, Cyrillic gibberish is symptomatic of using the wrong Cyrillic font. During the early years of the Russian sector of the World wide web, both KOI8 and codepage 1251 were common. As of 2017, one can still encounter HTML pages in codepage 1251 and, rarely, KOI8 encodings, besides every bit Unicode. (An estimated 1.7% of all web pages worldwide – all languages included – are encoded in codepage 1251.^[7]) Though the HTML standard includes the ability to specify the encoding for whatever given web folio in its source,^[viii] this is sometimes neglected, forcing the user to switch encodings in the browser manually.

In Bulgarian, mojibake is often called majmunica ( маймуница ), meaning "monkey's [alphabet]". In Serbian, it is called đubre ( ђубре ), meaning "trash". Different the erstwhile USSR, South Slavs never used something like KOI8, and Code Page 1251 was the dominant Cyrillic encoding at that place earlier Unicode. Therefore, these languages experienced fewer encoding incompatibility troubles than Russian. In the 1980s, Bulgarian computers used their ain MIK encoding, which is superficially similar to (although incompatible with) CP866.

Example

Russian example:		Кракозябры ( krakozyabry , garbage characters)
File encoding	Setting in browser	Result
MS-DOS 855	ISO 8859-1	Æá ÆÖóÞ¢áñ
KOI8-R	ISO 8859-1	ëÒÁËÏÚÑÂÒÙ
UTF-eight	KOI8-R	п я─п╟п╨п╬п╥я▐п╠я─я▀

Yugoslav languages [edit]

Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian (the dialects of the Yugoslav Serbo-Croatian linguistic communication) and Slovenian add to the bones Latin alphabet the letters š, đ, č, ć, ž, and their capital letter counterparts Š, Đ, Č, Ć, Ž (only č/Č, š/Š and ž/Ž in Slovene; officially, although others are used when needed, mostly in foreign names, also). All of these letters are defined in Latin-2 and Windows-1250, while simply some (š, Š, ž, Ž, Đ) exist in the usual OS-default Windows-1252, and are there because of some other languages.

Although Mojibake tin occur with any of these characters, the letters that are not included in Windows-1252 are much more than prone to errors. Thus, fifty-fifty present, "šđčćž ŠĐČĆŽ" is frequently displayed as "šðèæž ŠÐÈÆŽ", although ð, è, æ, È, Æ are never used in Slavic languages.

When confined to bones ASCII (near user names, for case), common replacements are: š→s, đ→dj, č→c, ć→c, ž→z (majuscule forms analogously, with Đ→Dj or Đ→DJ depending on word example). All of these replacements introduce ambiguities, so reconstructing the original from such a form is usually done manually if required.

The Windows-1252 encoding is of import considering the English versions of the Windows operating arrangement are nearly widespread, not localized ones.^{[ citation needed ]} The reasons for this include a relatively small and fragmented marketplace, increasing the price of high quality localization, a high caste of software piracy (in turn caused past loftier price of software compared to income), which discourages localization efforts, and people preferring English versions of Windows and other software.^{[ citation needed ]}

The bulldoze to differentiate Croatian from Serbian, Bosnian from Croation and Serbian, and at present even Montenegrin from the other three creates many problems. There are many different localizations, using different standards and of different quality. At that place are no common translations for the vast amount of reckoner terminology originating in English. In the cease, people use adopted English words ("kompjuter" for "figurer", "kompajlirati" for "compile," etc.), and if they are unaccustomed to the translated terms may not understand what some option in a menu is supposed to do based on the translated phrase. Therefore, people who empathise English language, as well equally those who are accepted to English language terminology (who are most, because English terminology is also more often than not taught in schools because of these problems) regularly choose the original English language versions of not-specialist software.

When Cyrillic script is used (for Macedonian and partially Serbian), the trouble is similar to other Cyrillic-based scripts.

Newer versions of English language Windows allow the code page to exist inverse (older versions require special English language versions with this back up), simply this setting tin can be and often was incorrectly set. For instance, Windows 98 and Windows Me tin can be set to most non-right-to-left single-byte code pages including 1250, simply only at install fourth dimension.

Caucasian languages [edit]

The writing systems of certain languages of the Caucasus region, including the scripts of Georgian and Armenian, may produce mojibake. This trouble is peculiarly acute in the instance of ArmSCII or ARMSCII, a set of obsolete character encodings for the Armenian alphabet which have been superseded past Unicode standards. ArmSCII is not widely used considering of a lack of back up in the reckoner industry. For case, Microsoft Windows does not back up information technology.

Asian encodings [edit]

Some other type of mojibake occurs when text is erroneously parsed in a multi-byte encoding, such equally one of the encodings for East Asian languages. With this kind of mojibake more ane (typically two) characters are corrupted at once, e.g. "k舐lek" ( kärlek ) in Swedish, where " är " is parsed every bit "舐". Compared to the above mojibake, this is harder to read, since letters unrelated to the problematic å, ä or ö are missing, and is specially problematic for short words starting with å, ä or ö such equally "än" (which becomes "舅"). Since two letters are combined, the mojibake also seems more than random (over fifty variants compared to the normal three, non counting the rarer capitals). In some rare cases, an unabridged text string which happens to include a pattern of particular word lengths, such every bit the sentence "Bush-league hid the facts", may exist misinterpreted.

Japanese [edit]

In Japanese, the phenomenon is, equally mentioned, called mojibake ( 文字化け ). Information technology is a detail problem in Japan due to the numerous different encodings that exist for Japanese text. Alongside Unicode encodings like UTF-eight and UTF-16, there are other standard encodings, such every bit Shift-JIS (Windows machines) and EUC-JP (UNIX systems). Mojibake, likewise equally being encountered by Japanese users, is also oft encountered by non-Japanese when attempting to run software written for the Japanese market.

Chinese [edit]

In Chinese, the same phenomenon is called Luàn mǎ (Pinyin, Simplified Chinese 乱码 , Traditional Chinese 亂碼 , significant 'chaotic lawmaking'), and can occur when computerised text is encoded in one Chinese character encoding but is displayed using the wrong encoding. When this occurs, it is often possible to set the issue by switching the character encoding without loss of data. The situation is complicated because of the existence of several Chinese character encoding systems in use, the near mutual ones being: Unicode, Big5, and Guobiao (with several backward compatible versions), and the possibility of Chinese characters being encoded using Japanese encoding.

It is easy to identify the original encoding when luanma occurs in Guobiao encodings:

Original encoding	Viewed every bit	Result	Original text	Note
Big5	GB	?T瓣в变巨肚	三國志曹操傳	Garbled Chinese characters with no hint of original meaning. The red character is not a valid codepoint in GB2312.
Shift-JIS	GB	暥帤壔偗僥僗僩	文字化けテスト	Kana is displayed equally characters with the radical 亻, while kanji are other characters. Most of them are extremely uncommon and not in practical apply in modernistic Chinese.
EUC-KR	GB	叼力捞钙胶 抛农聪墨	디제이맥스 테크니카	Random common Simplified Chinese characters which in nearly cases make no sense. Easily identifiable because of spaces between every several characters.

An additional problem is acquired when encodings are missing characters, which is mutual with rare or antiquated characters that are still used in personal or place names. Examples of this are Taiwanese politicians Wang Chien-shien (Chinese: 王建煊; pinyin: Wáng Jiànxuān )'s "煊", Yu Shyi-kun (simplified Chinese: 游锡堃; traditional Chinese: 游錫堃; pinyin: Yóu Xíkūn )'south "堃" and vocaliser David Tao (Chinese: 陶喆; pinyin: Táo Zhé )'s "喆" missing in Big5, ex-Red china Premier Zhu Rongji (Chinese: 朱镕基; pinyin: Zhū Róngjī )'s "镕" missing in GB2312, copyright symbol "©" missing in GBK.^[9]

Newspapers have dealt with this problem in various means, including using software to combine two existing, similar characters; using a picture of the personality; or simply substituting a homophone for the rare grapheme in the hope that the reader would be able to brand the right inference.

Indic text [edit]

A similar effect tin occur in Brahmic or Indic scripts of Southern asia, used in such Indo-Aryan or Indic languages as Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu), Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, and others, even if the character set employed is properly recognized by the application. This is considering, in many Indic scripts, the rules by which individual letter symbols combine to create symbols for syllables may non be properly understood by a computer missing the appropriate software, even if the glyphs for the individual letter forms are available.

Ane instance of this is the old Wikipedia logo, which attempts to evidence the character analogous to "wi" (the first syllable of "Wikipedia") on each of many puzzle pieces. The puzzle slice meant to bear the Devanagari graphic symbol for "wi" instead used to brandish the "wa" graphic symbol followed by an unpaired "i" modifier vowel, hands recognizable every bit mojibake generated by a estimator not configured to display Indic text.^[ten] The logo as redesigned every bit of May 2010^[ref] has fixed these errors.

The thought of Plain Text requires the operating system to provide a font to brandish Unicode codes. This font is different from Os to Os for Singhala and information technology makes orthographically incorrect glyphs for some letters (syllables) across all operating systems. For case, the 'reph', the short form for 'r' is a diacritic that commonly goes on top of a plain alphabetic character. Nonetheless, it is incorrect to proceed top of some letters like 'ya' or 'la' in specific contexts. For Sanskritic words or names inherited past modern languages, such equally कार्य, IAST: kārya, or आर्या, IAST: āryā, it is apt to put it on top of these letters. Past contrast, for similar sounds in modernistic languages which issue from their specific rules, information technology is not put on top, such equally the discussion करणाऱ्या, IAST: karaṇāryā, a stalk class of the common give-and-take करणारा/री, IAST: karaṇārā/rī, in the Marathi language.^[11] But it happens in most operating systems. This appears to exist a fault of internal programming of the fonts. In Mac Os and iOS, the muurdhaja l (dark l) and 'u' combination and its long grade both yield wrong shapes.^{[ commendation needed ]}

Some Indic and Indic-derived scripts, most notably Lao, were not officially supported by Windows XP until the release of Vista.^[12] However, diverse sites have made free-to-download fonts.

Burmese [edit]

Due to Western sanctions^[13] and the late arrival of Burmese language support in computers,^{[14] [15]} much of the early Burmese localization was homegrown without international cooperation. The prevailing means of Burmese support is via the Zawgyi font, a font that was created equally a Unicode font simply was in fact just partially Unicode compliant.^[15] In the Zawgyi font, some codepoints for Burmese script were implemented as specified in Unicode, but others were not.^[16] The Unicode Consortium refers to this as advertisement hoc font encodings.^[17] With the advent of mobile phones, mobile vendors such as Samsung and Huawei simply replaced the Unicode compliant organisation fonts with Zawgyi versions.^[14]

Due to these ad hoc encodings, communications between users of Zawgyi and Unicode would return as garbled text. To become around this issue, content producers would brand posts in both Zawgyi and Unicode.^[18] Myanmar authorities has designated i October 2019 as "U-Solar day" to officially switch to Unicode.^[13] The full transition is estimated to have two years.^[19]

African languages [edit]

In certain writing systems of Africa, unencoded text is unreadable. Texts that may produce mojibake include those from the Horn of Africa such as the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia and Eritrea, used for Amharic, Tigre, and other languages, and the Somali language, which employs the Osmanya alphabet. In Southern Africa, the Mwangwego alphabet is used to write languages of Malawi and the Mandombe alphabet was created for the Democratic Republic of the congo, but these are not generally supported. Various other writing systems native to West Africa present like problems, such every bit the Northward'Ko alphabet, used for Manding languages in Guinea, and the Vai syllabary, used in Republic of liberia.

Arabic [edit]

Another affected language is Arabic (see below). The text becomes unreadable when the encodings do not friction match.

Examples [edit]

File encoding	Setting in browser	Consequence
Arabic example:		(Universal Declaration of Homo Rights)
Browser rendering:		الإعلان العالمى لحقوق الإنسان
UTF-8	Windows-1252	الإعلان العالمى لحقوق الإنسان
	KOI8-R	О╩©ь╖ы└ь╔ь╧ы└ь╖ы├ ь╖ы└ь╧ь╖ы└ы┘ы┴ ы└ь╜ы┌ы┬ы┌ ь╖ы└ь╔ы├ьЁь╖ы├
	ISO 8859-five	яЛПиЇй�иЅиЙй�иЇй� иЇй�иЙиЇй�й�й� й�ий�й�й� иЇй�иЅй�иГиЇй�
	CP 866	я╗┐╪з┘Д╪е╪╣┘Д╪з┘Ж ╪з┘Д╪╣╪з┘Д┘Е┘Й ┘Д╪н┘В┘И┘В ╪з┘Д╪е┘Ж╪│╪з┘Ж
	ISO 8859-6	ُ؛؟ظ�ع�ظ�ظ�ع�ظ�ع� ظ�ع�ظ�ظ�ع�ع�ع� ع�ظع�ع�ع� ظ�ع�ظ�ع�ظ�ظ�ع�
	ISO 8859-2	اŮ�ŘĽŘšŮ�اŮ� اŮ�ؚاŮ�Ů�Ů� Ů�ŘŮ�Ů�Ů� اŮ�ŘĽŮ�ساŮ�
Windows-1256	Windows-1252	ÇáÅÚáÇä ÇáÚÇáãì áÍÞæÞ ÇáÅäÓÇä

The examples in this article exercise not have UTF-8 as browser setting, because UTF-8 is easily recognisable, then if a browser supports UTF-viii it should recognise information technology automatically, and non attempt to interpret something else as UTF-8.

See as well [edit]

• Code indicate
• Replacement character
• Substitute graphic symbol
• Newline – The conventions for representing the line break differ between Windows and Unix systems. Though most software supports both conventions (which is petty), software that must preserve or brandish the difference (e.g. version control systems and data comparing tools) can get substantially more hard to use if non adhering to one convention.
• Byte order marking – The almost in-band way to shop the encoding together with the data – prepend it. This is by intention invisible to humans using compliant software, just volition by design be perceived equally "garbage characters" to incompliant software (including many interpreters).
• HTML entities – An encoding of special characters in HTML, mostly optional, but required for sure characters to escape interpretation as markup.

  While failure to utilise this transformation is a vulnerability (encounter cross-site scripting), applying it too many times results in garbling of these characters. For example, the quotation marking " becomes ", ", " and and then on.

• Bush hid the facts

References [edit]

1. ^ ^{a b} Rex, Ritchie (2012). "Will unicode soon be the universal code? [The Data]". IEEE Spectrum. 49 (vii): 60. doi:10.1109/MSPEC.2012.6221090.
2. ^ WINDISCHMANN, Stephan (31 March 2004). "scroll -v linux.ars (Internationalization)". Ars Technica . Retrieved 5 October 2018.
3. ^ "Guidelines for extended attributes". 2013-05-17. Retrieved 2015-02-15 .
4. ^ "Unicode mailinglist on the Eudora e-mail client". 2001-05-13. Retrieved 2014-11-01 .
5. ^ "sms-scam". June 18, 2014. Retrieved June 19, 2014.
6. ^ p. 141, Control + Alt + Delete: A Dictionary of Cyberslang, Jonathon Keats, Globe Pequot, 2007, ISBN 1-59921-039-8.
7. ^ "Usage of Windows-1251 for websites".
8. ^ "Declaring character encodings in HTML".
9. ^ "Prc GBK (XGB)". Microsoft. Archived from the original on 2002-10-01. Conversion map between Lawmaking folio 936 and Unicode. Need manually selecting GB18030 or GBK in browser to view it correctly.
10. ^ Cohen, Noam (June 25, 2007). "Some Errors Defy Fixes: A Typo in Wikipedia's Logo Fractures the Sanskrit". The New York Times . Retrieved July 17, 2009.
11. ^ https://marathi.indiatyping.com/
12. ^ "Content Moved (Windows)". Msdn.microsoft.com. Retrieved 2014-02-05 .
13. ^ ^{a b} "Unicode in, Zawgyi out: Modernity finally catches upward in Myanmar's digital earth". The Japan Times. 27 September 2019. Retrieved 24 December 2019. October. i is "U-Day", when Myanmar officially will adopt the new system.... Microsoft and Apple helped other countries standardize years agone, but Western sanctions meant Myanmar lost out.
14. ^ ^{a b} Hotchkiss, Griffin (March 23, 2016). "Battle of the fonts". Frontier Myanmar . Retrieved 24 December 2019. With the release of Windows XP service pack ii, complex scripts were supported, which made it possible for Windows to render a Unicode-compliant Burmese font such every bit Myanmar1 (released in 2005). ... Myazedi, Bit, and later Zawgyi, circumscribed the rendering problem by calculation actress code points that were reserved for Myanmar's ethnic languages. Non but does the re-mapping prevent future ethnic language support, it as well results in a typing system that tin be confusing and inefficient, even for experienced users. ... Huawei and Samsung, the two almost popular smartphone brands in Myanmar, are motivated only by capturing the largest market place share, which means they support Zawgyi out of the box.
15. ^ ^{a b} Sin, Thant (vii September 2019). "Unified under ane font system as Myanmar prepares to drift from Zawgyi to Unicode". Rising Voices . Retrieved 24 December 2019. Standard Myanmar Unicode fonts were never mainstreamed different the individual and partially Unicode compliant Zawgyi font. ... Unicode volition better natural language processing
16. ^ "Why Unicode is Needed". Google Lawmaking: Zawgyi Projection . Retrieved 31 Oct 2013.
17. ^ "Myanmar Scripts and Languages". Often Asked Questions. Unicode Consortium. Retrieved 24 December 2019. "UTF-8" technically does non utilize to ad hoc font encodings such as Zawgyi.
18. ^ LaGrow, Nick; Pruzan, Miri (September 26, 2019). "Integrating autoconversion: Facebook's path from Zawgyi to Unicode - Facebook Engineering". Facebook Engineering. Facebook. Retrieved 25 December 2019. It makes communication on digital platforms hard, every bit content written in Unicode appears garbled to Zawgyi users and vice versa. ... In order to improve reach their audiences, content producers in Myanmar oftentimes mail in both Zawgyi and Unicode in a single post, not to mention English or other languages.
19. ^ Saw Yi Nanda (21 November 2019). "Myanmar switch to Unicode to take two years: app developer". The Myanmar Times . Retrieved 24 December 2019.

External links [edit]

bellrealst.blogspot.com

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake