Windows-1252 to UTF-8 - Western European Converter

Convert Windows-1252 to UTF-8 online. Fix mojibake from legacy Windows systems with smart quotes, Euro sign, em dash. Private, instant, no uploads.

Input (Windows-1252)

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Output (UTF-8)

About Windows-1252 Encoding

Windows-1252 is the most common legacy Windows encoding for Western European languages. It extends ISO-8859-1 by adding useful characters like the Euro sign (€), smart quotes (" "), em dash (—), and trademark symbol (™) in the 0x80-0x9F byte range.

Common sources: Excel CSV exports, Access database dumps, legacy Windows web applications, old email archives, and pre-UTF-8 CMS platforms.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Windows-1252, also known as CP-1252 or Windows Western European, is a legacy single-byte character encoding designed by Microsoft for Western European languages. It was the default encoding for English and Western European versions of Windows before Unicode adoption. Windows-1252 extends ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) by using the 0x80-0x9F range for printable characters like the Euro sign (€), smart quotes, and em dashes.

Windows-1252 persists in legacy Windows databases (SQL Server, Access), old CMS platforms, email archives from pre-2010 Windows systems, CSV exports from Excel and accounting software, web scraping from older Western European websites, corporate document management systems, and government legacy systems. Many financial and healthcare databases still export reports in Windows-1252.

ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) leaves byte positions 0x80-0x9F undefined (reserved for control characters), while Windows-1252 fills these positions with useful printable characters including Euro sign, trademark, smart quotes, curly apostrophes, em dash, en dash, and bullet. This makes Windows-1252 incompatible with true Latin-1. Most Latin-1 content on the web is actually Windows-1252.

The most problematic characters are: Euro sign, smart left/right quotes, curly apostrophes, em dash, en dash, ellipsis, trademark, and bullet. These appear as garbled sequences like Euro becoming three characters when Windows-1252 text is incorrectly interpreted as UTF-8.

UTF-8 is the universal web standard supporting all languages and characters. Converting Windows-1252 to UTF-8 ensures proper display across browsers and platforms, prevents mojibake in international contexts, enables proper database indexing and search, maintains compatibility with modern APIs and JSON, and future-proofs content for multilingual expansion.

Indicators include: seeing â€™ instead of apostrophes, â€œ/â€ instead of smart quotes, â‚¬ instead of €, files exported from Windows applications (Excel, Access, Notepad), HTTP headers with 'charset=windows-1252' or 'charset=iso-8859-1' (often mislabeled), text from legacy Windows web servers, and database dumps showing garbled punctuation but correct English letters.

This tool supports both direct text paste and file uploads. You can upload .txt files, CSV exports, SQL dumps, HTML files, or any text-based file encoded in Windows-1252. All processing happens locally in your browser with no server uploads, ensuring complete privacy. The converted UTF-8 result can be copied to clipboard or downloaded as a file.

If you paste UTF-8 text into this tool, it will attempt to interpret it as Windows-1252, which may produce incorrect results. This is called double-encoding. If the output looks worse than the input, your text is likely already UTF-8. The tool works best on actual Windows-1252 encoded bytes from file uploads or legacy system exports.

Yes, completely safe. All conversion happens locally in your browser using the built-in TextDecoder API. No data is uploaded to any server, transmitted over the network, or stored anywhere. Your files and text never leave your computer. This makes the tool ideal for confidential documents, financial reports, customer databases, and other sensitive content.

This tool processes one file at a time in your browser. For batch conversion of multiple files, you can process each file individually, or use command-line tools like 'iconv' for server-side batch operations. The browser-based approach prioritizes privacy and works well for typical file sizes up to 50MB. For very large batch operations, consider scripting solutions.

About Windows-1252 Encoding

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