CSVClinic
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CSV REPAIR GUIDE

Fix garbled CSV text and encoding.

If names like “José” appear as “José”, the bytes were decoded with the wrong character set. CSV Clinic checks UTF-8 first, falls back to Windows-1252 when needed, and exports an Excel-friendly UTF-8 file.

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Why CSV mojibake happens

A CSV file contains bytes, but it usually does not declare how those bytes map to characters. Opening UTF-8 as Windows-1252—or Windows-1252 as UTF-8—creates mojibake. Re-saving the visibly garbled text can make the damage permanent.

Safe repair steps

  1. Keep an untouched copy of the original file.
  2. Detect the source encoding before editing text.
  3. Decode once using that encoding.
  4. Export as UTF-8 with a byte-order mark when Excel compatibility matters.
  5. Verify accented names and currency symbols before replacing the source.

What the free tool changes

The repair runs in your browser. It does not upload the CSV. Alongside encoding normalization, it can make headers unique, pad uneven rows, remove exact duplicate records, and neutralize formula-like spreadsheet cells. A downloadable JSON report records the changes.

Open CSV Clinic