Windows-1251 to UTF-8 - Cyrillic Text Converter

Convert Windows-1251 (Cyrillic) to UTF-8 online. Fix Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian mojibake from legacy systems. Works offline, no uploads, instant results.

Input (Windows-1251)

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Output (UTF-8)

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Frequently Asked Questions

Windows-1251 is a legacy single-byte character encoding designed by Microsoft for Cyrillic script languages including Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Macedonian. It was widely used in Windows systems before Unicode became standard, and is still found in older databases, emails, and files from Eastern European legacy systems.

Modern web applications, databases, and systems use UTF-8 as the standard encoding. Converting Windows-1251 to UTF-8 ensures proper display of Cyrillic text across platforms, prevents mojibake (garbled text), enables multilingual support, and maintains compatibility with international systems and APIs.

Mojibake (кракозябры in Russian) occurs when text encoded in one character set is incorrectly interpreted as another. If you see garbled Russian text like 'ÐŸÑ€Ð¸Ð²ÐµÑ‚' instead of 'Привет', it means Windows-1251 text was misinterpreted as UTF-8. This tool correctly decodes the original encoding and re-encodes it properly.

Windows-1251 is used primarily for Cyrillic script languages including Russian (Русский), Ukrainian (Українська), Belarusian (Беларуская), Bulgarian (Български), Serbian (Српски), and Macedonian (Македонски). It's still found in legacy systems, old emails, and databases from the 1990s-2000s era in Eastern European countries.

All three are Cyrillic encodings but differ in their character mappings: KOI8-R was popular in UNIX/Linux systems and Russian internet (Runet) in the 1990s, ISO-8859-5 is an international standard but less commonly used, while Windows-1251 dominated Windows environments and became the de facto standard for Russian Windows software. Windows-1251 has better coverage of box-drawing characters and punctuation.

This tool supports both file upload and direct text paste. You can upload .txt files, CSV files, SQL dumps, or any text-based file encoded in Windows-1251. The tool processes the file in your browser and provides options to download the UTF-8 converted result or copy it to clipboard.

Common indicators include: seeing garbled Cyrillic text when opened in UTF-8 editors, files from Windows systems before 2010, email headers showing 'charset=windows-1251', Russian text displaying as Latin characters with special symbols, or database exports from legacy Russian/Ukrainian systems. If Russian text looks correct in old Windows Notepad but garbled in modern editors, it's likely Windows-1251.

Common issues include: double-encoding (text already partially converted), mixed encodings in the same file, loss of special characters not in Windows-1251 range, incorrect source encoding detection (might be KOI8-R or DOS codepage), and BOM (Byte Order Mark) handling. Always keep backups and verify the output displays correctly before replacing original files.

Windows-1251 persists in: legacy email systems and archives from Russian/Ukrainian companies, older CMS platforms that haven't been updated, database exports from systems built in the 2000s, government and institutional systems in Eastern Europe, and automated reports from industrial equipment. Many legacy systems require costly migrations to switch to UTF-8.

This tool processes one file or text block at a time in your browser. For batch processing multiple files, you can use the tool repeatedly or consider command-line tools like 'iconv' for server-side conversion. The browser-based approach ensures privacy as no files are uploaded to servers, but may have memory limits for very large files (typically 50MB+).

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