Character Encoding Detector

Analyze text or hex byte sequences to detect character encoding. Identify UTF-8, ASCII, ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252, UTF-16, and more with confidence scoring and byte-level analysis.

Paste Text:

Hex Bytes:

Enter space-separated hex bytes (e.g., EF BB BF for UTF-8 BOM)

Select File:

File is read locally in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.

Samples:

How It Works

Character encoding determines how bytes are mapped to characters. When encoding is unknown or mismatched, text appears garbled (mojibake). This tool analyzes byte patterns to identify the most likely encoding.

Detection Methods

BOM Detection — Byte Order Marks at the start of data uniquely identify UTF-8 (EF BB BF), UTF-16 LE (FF FE), and UTF-16 BE (FE FF)
UTF-8 Validation — UTF-8 has strict byte sequence rules: single bytes (0xxxxxxx), two-byte (110xxxxx 10xxxxxx), three-byte (1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx), and four-byte (11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx)
Statistical Analysis — Byte frequency distribution is compared against known encoding patterns
Heuristic Scoring — Each candidate encoding receives a confidence score based on multiple signals

Common Encodings

Encoding	Bytes	Description
ASCII	1	Basic English characters (0-127). Subset of all modern encodings.
UTF-8	1-4	Variable-width encoding. Dominant on the web (98%+ of pages). Backward-compatible with ASCII.
ISO-8859-1	1	Latin-1. Western European characters. Bytes 0x80-0xFF map directly to Unicode U+0080-U+00FF.
Windows-1252	1	Superset of ISO-8859-1 with printable characters in 0x80-0x9F range (smart quotes, em dash, etc.).
UTF-16 BE	2/4	Fixed 2-byte (BMP) or 4-byte (supplementary) encoding, big-endian byte order.
UTF-16 LE	2/4	Same as UTF-16 BE but little-endian. Default on Windows.

What is a BOM?

A Byte Order Mark (U+FEFF) is an optional signature at the start of a text stream. It identifies both the encoding and byte order:

BOM Bytes	Encoding
`EF BB BF`	UTF-8
`FE FF`	UTF-16 Big-Endian
`FF FE`	UTF-16 Little-Endian
`00 00 FE FF`	UTF-32 Big-Endian
`FF FE 00 00`	UTF-32 Little-Endian

Embed This Util

You can embed this util on your own site as a widget. Adding ?embed=1 to the URL loads a compact version with just the tool itself; no header, menu, or documentation. Paste this snippet into your HTML:

Copy snippet Adjust the height to taste.

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