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Text Encoding Detector

Guess the encoding of pasted bytes or a file by testing the common encodings and scoring each result.

Detect the encoding

Best guess: —
Confidence: —
Paste hex bytes, paste text or choose a file to analyse.

How to use the Text Encoding Detector

  1. Paste hex bytes, paste some text or choose a file.
  2. Let the tool test each candidate encoding against the bytes.
  3. Read the best guess, the confidence and the decoded preview.

Features

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Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about the free online text encoding detector.

It decodes the bytes with each candidate encoding and scores the result on printable characters and decoding errors.
A byte order mark is a short signature at the start of a file that names the encoding and the byte order, making the answer certain.
UTF-8 is strict about byte patterns, so when the bytes decode cleanly with no errors it is almost certainly UTF-8.
Text stored as UTF-16 usually has a zero byte next to every ASCII character, and the side the zeros fall on shows the byte order.
A replacement character is shown when a byte cannot be decoded, so a count above zero means the guess is probably wrong.
Both map single bytes to characters, but Windows-1252 gives printable characters such as curly quotes where Latin-1 has control codes.
Yes. Choose a file and up to the first 4096 bytes are read on your device and scored.
Short or mostly ASCII samples decode under several encodings, so the scores are too close to be certain.
No. The file is read with FileReader in your browser and no byte of it ever leaves your device.
Yes. Encoding detection is a guess based on byte patterns, so check the preview before trusting the answer.

Last updated: October 10, 2026