Windows-1254 to UTF-8 - Turkish Text Converter

Convert Windows-1254 (Turkish) to UTF-8 online. Fix Turkish characters çğıöşü from legacy systems. Works offline, no uploads, instant results.

Input (Windows-1254)

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Output (UTF-8)

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Frequently Asked Questions

Windows-1254 is a legacy single-byte character encoding designed by Microsoft specifically for Turkish language text. It extends ISO-8859-9 (Latin-5) to include all Turkish-specific characters including ğ (yumuşak g), ş (şe), ı (undotted i), İ (dotted I), ö (o-umlaut), ü (u-umlaut), and ç (c-cedilla). It was the standard encoding for Turkish Windows systems before Unicode adoption.

Modern web applications, databases, and systems use UTF-8 as the universal standard. Converting Windows-1254 to UTF-8 ensures proper display of Turkish characters across all platforms, prevents mojibake (garbled text like Ä±ÅŸ instead of ış), enables multilingual support, and maintains compatibility with international systems, mobile devices, and modern content management systems.

Windows-1254 includes six special characters unique to Turkish: lowercase ç (c-cedilla), ğ (yumuşak g/soft g), ı (undotted i), ö (o-umlaut), ş (şe), ü (u-umlaut), and their uppercase versions Ç, Ğ, İ (dotted capital I), Ö, Ş, Ü. The distinction between I/ı and İ/i is particularly important in Turkish, where 'i' and 'I' are not case pairs of each other.

Windows-1254 is found in: legacy Turkish Windows systems from the 1990s-2010s, older Turkish websites and forums, email archives from Turkish companies, database exports from Turkish banking and government systems, Microsoft Access databases from Turkey, old ERP systems used in Turkish businesses, and Turkish language documents created in legacy versions of Microsoft Office.

Windows-1254 is based on ISO-8859-9 (Latin-5) but includes additional characters in the 0x80-0x9F range that are undefined in ISO-8859-9. Both encodings support Turkish characters (ğ, ı, ş, etc.), but Windows-1254 adds Windows-specific punctuation marks, smart quotes, and box-drawing characters in positions 128-159, making it more suitable for Turkish text in Windows environments.

Turkish has four distinct letters: lowercase 'i' (dotted i) which uppercases to 'İ' (dotted capital I), and lowercase 'ı' (undotted i) which uppercases to 'I' (undotted capital I). This differs from English where 'i' becomes 'I'. Windows-1254 properly supports this distinction with İ at 0xDD and ı at 0xFD, which is crucial for correct Turkish text processing and case conversion.

Common indicators include: Turkish characters appearing garbled (şehir becomes ÅŸehir, çağ becomes Ã§aÄŸ), files from Turkish Windows systems before 2015, email headers showing 'charset=windows-1254' or 'charset=iso-8859-9', database exports from Turkish legacy systems, or .txt files that display correctly in old Windows Notepad but show gibberish in modern UTF-8 editors and browsers.

Key test words include: Türkiye (Turkey), Türkçe (Turkish language), çağ (era), şehir (city), öğrenci (student), ışık (light), Atatürk (founder's name), Göztepe (place name), müşteri (customer), and iğne (needle). If these display with garbled ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş, ü characters, you likely have an encoding mismatch between Windows-1254 source and UTF-8 display.

Yes, this tool supports both file upload and text paste for Turkish content. You can upload .txt files, CSV exports, SQL dumps, or any text-based file encoded in Windows-1254. The tool processes files entirely in your browser with no server uploads, ensuring privacy. It handles Turkish database exports, email archives, and legacy system backups commonly found in Turkish businesses.

Common problems include: double-encoding (text already partially converted showing extra garbling), mixed encodings in the same document, confusion between Windows-1254 and ISO-8859-9, case conversion errors with I/ı vs İ/i pairs, loss of Turkish-specific punctuation, and BOM handling differences. Always test the output with Turkish-specific characters (ğ, ş, ı, İ) to verify correctness before replacing original files.

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