ISO-8859-2 to UTF-8 - Central European Converter

Convert ISO-8859-2 (Latin-2) text to UTF-8 encoding. Handles Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Slovak legacy systems. Browser-based, private, no uploads to servers.

Input (ISO-8859-2)

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TXT, CSV, SQL from Central European systems

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Output (UTF-8)

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Frequently Asked Questions

ISO-8859-2, also known as Latin-2, is a character encoding designed for Central and Eastern European languages. It supports 191 characters including ASCII plus additional letters with diacritics needed for Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Romanian, and other languages. Developed in 1987, it was widely used before UTF-8 became the dominant encoding standard.

ISO-8859-2 supports Polish (ąćęłńóśźż), Czech (áčďéěíňóřšťúůýž), Hungarian (áéíóöőúüű), Slovak (áäčďéíĺľňóôŕšťúýž), Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian (Latin script), Romanian, Albanian, and German with umlauts. It's particularly common in legacy systems, databases, and files from Central European countries created before 2000.

Latin-2 is the informal name for ISO-8859-2 because it's the second variant in the ISO-8859 family of Latin-script encodings. Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) covers Western European languages, while Latin-2 extends support to Central and Eastern European languages that use additional diacritical marks not found in Latin-1. The 'Latin' refers to the Latin alphabet as opposed to Cyrillic, Greek, or other scripts.

UTF-8 is the universal modern encoding standard supported by all web browsers, databases, and programming languages. Converting from ISO-8859-2 ensures compatibility with international systems, prevents mojibake (garbled text), enables proper display across platforms, and future-proofs your data. Legacy files from old databases, email archives, or FTP systems often need conversion to work with modern web applications.

Both encodings support Central European languages, but Windows-1250 (CP1250) is Microsoft's proprietary variant with different character mappings in the 128-159 range. ISO-8859-2 leaves these positions undefined (control characters), while Windows-1250 uses them for additional symbols like curly quotes and the euro sign. Files from DOS or Windows systems may use CP1250 instead of ISO-8859-2, requiring different decoding.

Yes, you can upload text files encoded in ISO-8859-2 or paste text directly. The tool reads the file as raw bytes, decodes them using the ISO-8859-2 character set, and converts to UTF-8. All processing happens in your browser using the TextDecoder API—no data is sent to servers. You can then download the UTF-8 version or copy it to clipboard.

Detection is challenging since ISO-8859-2 doesn't have a magic number or byte order mark. Look for context clues: files from Central European legacy systems, databases, or old websites; presence of characters like ą, ę, ł, ń (Polish), č, ř, ů (Czech), or ő, ű (Hungarian). If text appears garbled in UTF-8 but makes sense when decoded as ISO-8859-2, that's a strong indicator. You can also try the conversion and check if diacritics display correctly.

Yes, all diacritics are perfectly preserved. UTF-8 is a superset that can represent every character in ISO-8859-2. Characters like Polish ł, Czech ř, Hungarian ő are all part of the Unicode standard and have exact UTF-8 equivalents. The conversion is lossless—you won't lose any information. Only the byte representation changes, not the characters themselves.

Common problems include: wrong source encoding (file is actually Windows-1250 or UTF-8), missing byte order marks causing auto-detection failures, mixed encodings within the same file, and control characters in the 128-159 range. If output looks garbled, verify the input encoding using a hex editor or try alternative encodings. Some old systems used custom code pages that aren't standard ISO-8859-2.

This tool processes one file or text block at a time. For batch conversion of multiple files, you can use command-line tools like iconv (Linux/Mac) with the command 'iconv -f ISO-8859-2 -t UTF-8 input.txt > output.txt' or write a script that loops through files. For web-based batch processing, you'd need to upload and convert each file sequentially, downloading the results individually.

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