Windows-1250 to UTF-8 - Central European Converter

Convert Windows-1250 (Central European) to UTF-8 online. Fix Polish, Czech, Hungarian mojibake from legacy systems. Works offline, no uploads, instant results.

Input (Windows-1250)

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Output (UTF-8)

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Frequently Asked Questions

Windows-1250 is a legacy single-byte character encoding designed by Microsoft for Central European languages using Latin script with diacritics. It supports Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Romanian, Albanian, and other languages. Each character is represented by one byte (0-255), and it was the standard for Central European Windows systems before UTF-8 became dominant.

Windows-1250 supports Polish (język polski), Czech (čeština), Slovak (slovenčina), Hungarian (magyar), Slovenian (slovenščina), Croatian (hrvatski), Romanian (română), Serbian Latin (srpski latinica), Bosnian (bosanski), and Albanian (shqip). It includes special characters like Polish ąćęłńóśźż, Czech čďěňřšťůž, and Hungarian őű.

Modern web applications, databases, and systems use UTF-8 as the universal encoding standard. Converting Windows-1250 to UTF-8 ensures proper display of Central European characters across platforms, prevents mojibake (garbled text), enables multilingual content mixing, and maintains compatibility with international systems, APIs, and modern frameworks.

Mojibake occurs when text encoded in one character set is incorrectly interpreted as another. If you see garbled Polish text like 'ĹťÄ…Ĺ‚ĹĄÄ‡' instead of 'żółć', it means Windows-1250 text was misinterpreted as UTF-8. This tool correctly decodes the original Windows-1250 bytes and re-encodes them as proper UTF-8, restoring the intended characters.

Windows-1250 and ISO-8859-2 are both Central European encodings but differ in character mappings: Windows-1250 was designed by Microsoft for Windows systems and includes additional punctuation marks, smart quotes, and euro sign (€). ISO-8859-2 is an international standard with slightly different character positions. Windows-1250 became more widely used due to Windows dominance in the region during the 1990s-2000s.

This tool supports both file upload and direct text paste. You can upload .txt files, CSV exports, SQL dumps, HTML files, or any text-based file encoded in Windows-1250. The tool processes files entirely in your browser with no server uploads, and provides options to download the UTF-8 converted result or copy it to clipboard.

Common indicators include: seeing garbled Polish, Czech, or Hungarian characters when opened in UTF-8 editors, files from Windows systems before 2010 in Central Europe, email headers showing 'charset=windows-1250' or 'Content-Type: text/html; charset=windows-1250', database exports from legacy Polish/Czech/Hungarian systems, or characters like ą ę ł ń ó ś ź ż displaying as strange symbols.

Common sources include: legacy databases from Central European companies, email archives from Polish/Czech/Hungarian organizations, government document systems in Central Europe, old CMS platforms, ERP system exports, banking transaction files, invoicing systems, customer databases from 1990s-2000s, and automated reports from industrial equipment manufactured in Central European countries.

Windows-1250 persists in: legacy database systems that haven't been migrated, archived email repositories, exported reports from older ERP/CRM systems, government and institutional databases in Central Europe, backup files from Windows XP/2000 era systems, CSV exports from legacy accounting software, and industrial control systems. Migration to UTF-8 often requires expensive system upgrades and data conversion projects.

Common issues include: double-encoding (text already partially converted causing corruption), mixed encodings in the same file (some sections in Windows-1250, others in UTF-8), incorrect source encoding detection (might be ISO-8859-2 or CP852), loss of characters outside the Windows-1250 range, BOM (Byte Order Mark) handling differences, and line ending conversions. Always verify output and maintain backups before replacing original files.

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