xlocale

SEA Mojibake & Legacy Encoding Fixer — TIS-620, Windows-1258, VISCII

Fix garbled Thai and Vietnamese text — get ranked candidate decodings across TIS-620, Windows-1258, and VISCII, 100% in your browser.

Input
Paste garbled Thai/Vietnamese text, or raw bytes to decode.
Mode:

Paste input above, or try an example.

Decoding runs entirely in your browser (TextDecoder + bundled VISCII/Windows-1252 tables) — nothing is uploaded. Several encodings can produce plausible output for the same bytes, so verify the top result by eye.
About

About SEA Mojibake & Legacy Encoding Fixer — TIS-620, Windows-1258, VISCII

Legacy database migrations and data recovery in Thailand and Vietnam constantly produce mojibake — text where Thai or Vietnamese was stored in an old 8-bit encoding and later read as UTF-8, or vice-versa, leaving garbled characters like สวัสดี instead of สวัสดี. Generic mojibake fixers only offer Latin-1, Windows-1252, and East-Asian encodings; none let you decode TIS-620/Windows-874 (Thai), Windows-1258 (Vietnamese), or VISCII (Vietnamese). This tool does, and ranks the candidates for you.

Two modes. In mojibake mode, paste the garbled text: the tool reconstructs the original bytes (interpreting the string as Latin-1 or Windows-1252, the two common misreads) and re-decodes them with each Southeast Asian target encoding, then ranks the results by how much valid Thai or Vietnamese they contain. In raw-bytes mode, paste hex or base64 and see every candidate decoding side by side. Windows-1258 output is normalized to precomposed (NFC) Vietnamese, and VISCII is decoded from a bundled table verified against RFC 1456, since browsers do not support it natively.

Everything runs locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded. Candidate decodings are scored by the proportion of code points that fall in the Thai block or the Vietnamese Latin ranges, with replacement characters (U+FFFD) penalized, so the most plausible fix rises to the top. It is a recovery aid: always eyeball the result, because several encodings can produce plausible-looking output for the same bytes.

How to use SEA Mojibake & Legacy Encoding Fixer — TIS-620, Windows-1258, VISCII

  1. Choose a mode

    Use mojibake mode for garbled text you can see, or raw-bytes mode to paste hex/base64 you want to decode.

  2. Paste the input

    Drop in the garbled string, or the bytes. Try an example if you just want to see how it works.

  3. Read the ranked candidates

    Each candidate shows the decoded text and which encoding produced it, ranked by how much valid Thai/Vietnamese it contains.

  4. Pick and copy

    Copy the decoding that reads correctly. Several encodings can look plausible, so verify the top result by eye.

Frequently asked questions

Related miscellaneous tools

SEA Word Segmenter — Thai, Khmer, Burmese, Lao

Split spaceless Southeast Asian text (Thai, Khmer, Burmese, Lao) into words in your browser — see word boundaries, count words, and insert zero-width spaces for line breaks. Nothing is uploaded.