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Garbled text as a result of wrong graphic symbol encoding

Mojibake ( 文字化け ; IPA: [mod͡ʑibake]) is the garbled text that is the effect of text existence decoded using an unintended character encoding.^[one] The consequence is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, frequently from a unlike writing organisation.

This display may include the generic replacement character ("�") in places where the binary representation is considered invalid. A replacement tin can too involve multiple consecutive symbols, as viewed in one encoding, when the same binary code constitutes one symbol in the other encoding. This is either because of differing constant length encoding (as in Asian 16-bit encodings vs European 8-fleck encodings), or the employ of variable length encodings (notably UTF-viii and UTF-16).

Failed rendering of glyphs due to either missing fonts or missing glyphs in a font is a different issue that is not to be confused with mojibake. Symptoms of this failed rendering include blocks with the code signal displayed in hexadecimal or using the generic replacement character. Importantly, these replacements are valid and are the consequence of correct mistake handling by the software.

Etymology [edit]

Mojibake ways "graphic symbol transformation" in Japanese. The word is composed of 文字 (moji, IPA: [mod͡ʑi]), "graphic symbol" and 化け (bake, IPA: [bäke̞], pronounced "bah-keh"), "transform".

Causes [edit]

To correctly reproduce the original text that was encoded, the correspondence betwixt the encoded data and the notion of its encoding must exist preserved. As mojibake is the example of non-compliance between these, it can be accomplished by manipulating the data itself, or just relabeling it.

Mojibake is often seen with text data that accept been tagged with a incorrect encoding; it may not even be tagged at all, but moved between computers with different default encodings. A major source of trouble are communication protocols that rely on settings on each reckoner rather than sending or storing metadata together with the data.

The differing default settings betwixt computers are in role due to differing deployments of Unicode among operating organization families, and partly the legacy encodings' specializations for different writing systems of human languages. Whereas Linux distributions mostly switched to UTF-8 in 2004,^[2] Microsoft Windows more often than not uses UTF-16, and sometimes uses 8-bit code pages for text files in unlike languages.^{[ dubious – discuss ]}

For some writing systems, an case being Japanese, several encodings have historically been employed, causing users to encounter mojibake relatively often. Equally a Japanese instance, the word mojibake "文字化け" stored every bit EUC-JP might be incorrectly displayed as "ﾊｸｻ�ｽ､ｱ", "ﾊｸｻ嵂ｽ､ｱ" (MS-932), or "ﾊｸｻ郾ｽ､ｱ" (Shift JIS-2004). The same text stored as UTF-8 is displayed as "譁�蟄怜喧縺�" if interpreted as Shift JIS. This is farther exacerbated if other locales are involved: the same UTF-eight text appears as "文字化ã'" in software that assumes text to be in the Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-i encodings, usually labelled Western, or (for instance) as "鏂囧瓧鍖栥亼" if interpreted as being in a GBK (Cathay) locale.

Mojibake example

Original text	文		字		化		け
Raw bytes of EUC-JP encoding	CA	B8	BB	FA	B2	BD	A4	B1
Bytes interpreted as Shift-JIS encoding	ﾊ	ｸ	ｻ	郾		ｽ	､	ｱ
Bytes interpreted equally ISO-8859-1 encoding	Ê	¸	»	ú	²	½	¤	±
Bytes interpreted every bit GBK encoding	矢		机		步		け

Underspecification [edit]

If the encoding is not specified, it is up to the software to decide it past other means. Depending on the blazon of software, the typical solution is either configuration or charset detection heuristics. Both are prone to mis-prediction in not-so-uncommon scenarios.

The encoding of text files is affected by locale setting, which depends on the user'southward language, brand of operating system and maybe other conditions. Therefore, the assumed encoding is systematically wrong for files that come from a computer with a different setting, or fifty-fifty from a differently localized software inside the aforementioned system. For Unicode, one solution is to use a byte order mark, but for source lawmaking and other automobile readable text, many parsers don't tolerate this. Another is storing the encoding equally metadata in the file organization. File systems that back up extended file attributes can store this equally user.charset.^[3] This also requires back up in software that wants to accept advantage of it, but does not disturb other software.

While a few encodings are easy to detect, in detail UTF-8, at that place are many that are hard to distinguish (see charset detection). A web browser may not exist able to distinguish a page coded in EUC-JP and another in Shift-JIS if the coding scheme is non assigned explicitly using HTTP headers sent along with the documents, or using the HTML certificate's meta tags that are used to substitute for missing HTTP headers if the server cannot be configured to transport the proper HTTP headers; run across grapheme encodings in HTML.

Mis-specification [edit]

Mojibake also occurs when the encoding is wrongly specified. This often happens betwixt encodings that are similar. For instance, the Eudora email client for Windows was known to send emails labelled as ISO-8859-1 that were in reality Windows-1252.^[4] The Mac OS version of Eudora did not showroom this behaviour. Windows-1252 contains extra printable characters in the C1 range (the about frequently seen being curved quotation marks and actress dashes), that were not displayed properly in software complying with the ISO standard; this especially affected software running under other operating systems such as Unix.

Homo ignorance [edit]

Of the encodings even so in utilise, many are partially uniform with each other, with ASCII as the predominant common subset. This sets the stage for human ignorance:

• Compatibility can exist a deceptive holding, as the common subset of characters is unaffected past a mixup of ii encodings (see Bug in different writing systems).
• People remember they are using ASCII, and tend to label any superset of ASCII they actually use every bit "ASCII". Mayhap for simplification, but fifty-fifty in academic literature, the word "ASCII" can be institute used equally an example of something not compatible with Unicode, where apparently "ASCII" is Windows-1252 and "Unicode" is UTF-8.^[1] Note that UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII.

Overspecification [edit]

When there are layers of protocols, each trying to specify the encoding based on different information, the least sure information may be misleading to the recipient. For case, consider a web server serving a static HTML file over HTTP. The character set may exist communicated to the client in any number of 3 ways:

• in the HTTP header. This information tin be based on server configuration (for instance, when serving a file off deejay) or controlled by the application running on the server (for dynamic websites).
• in the file, as an HTML meta tag (http-equiv or charset) or the encoding attribute of an XML proclamation. This is the encoding that the writer meant to save the particular file in.
• in the file, as a byte order marker. This is the encoding that the author'due south editor actually saved it in. Unless an accidental encoding conversion has happened (by opening it in one encoding and saving information technology in another), this will be correct. Information technology is, still, merely available in Unicode encodings such as UTF-8 or UTF-sixteen.

Lack of hardware or software support [edit]

Much older hardware is typically designed to support just i character gear up and the character ready typically cannot exist altered. The grapheme table contained inside the display firmware volition be localized to have characters for the country the device is to be sold in, and typically the table differs from land to country. As such, these systems volition potentially display mojibake when loading text generated on a system from a different state. Likewise, many early operating systems do not support multiple encoding formats and thus will end up displaying mojibake if made to display not-standard text—early on versions of Microsoft Windows and Palm Bone for example, are localized on a per-country basis and will only support encoding standards relevant to the state the localized version will be sold in, and volition brandish mojibake if a file containing a text in a different encoding format from the version that the Os is designed to support is opened.

Resolutions [edit]

Applications using UTF-8 as a default encoding may achieve a greater caste of interoperability considering of its widespread use and backward compatibility with United states-ASCII. UTF-eight also has the ability to be directly recognised by a simple algorithm, then that well written software should exist able to avoid mixing UTF-8 up with other encodings.

The difficulty of resolving an case of mojibake varies depending on the application inside which information technology occurs and the causes of it. Ii of the most common applications in which mojibake may occur are web browsers and word processors. Modernistic browsers and word processors often back up a wide array of grapheme encodings. Browsers often allow a user to alter their rendering engine's encoding setting on the wing, while discussion processors allow the user to select the advisable encoding when opening a file. Information technology may accept some trial and mistake for users to find the correct encoding.

The problem gets more complicated when it occurs in an application that normally does not support a wide range of character encoding, such as in a non-Unicode computer game. In this instance, the user must modify the operating organization'south encoding settings to match that of the game. Yet, irresolute the arrangement-wide encoding settings can also cause Mojibake in pre-existing applications. In Windows XP or later, a user also has the selection to use Microsoft AppLocale, an application that allows the changing of per-application locale settings. Even so, irresolute the operating system encoding settings is non possible on earlier operating systems such as Windows 98; to resolve this issue on earlier operating systems, a user would have to use tertiary party font rendering applications.

Bug in different writing systems [edit]

English [edit]

Mojibake in English texts generally occurs in punctuation, such as em dashes (—), en dashes (–), and curly quotes (",",','), but rarely in grapheme text, since most encodings agree with ASCII on the encoding of the English alphabet. For instance, the pound sign "£" will appear every bit "£" if it was encoded by the sender every bit UTF-8 just interpreted by the recipient as CP1252 or ISO 8859-1. If iterated using CP1252, this can pb to "£", "£", "ÃÆ'‚£", etc.

Some computers did, in older eras, have vendor-specific encodings which acquired mismatch also for English language text. Commodore brand 8-flake computers used PETSCII encoding, specially notable for inverting the upper and lower instance compared to standard ASCII. PETSCII printers worked fine on other computers of the era, but flipped the case of all letters. IBM mainframes use the EBCDIC encoding which does not friction match ASCII at all.

Other Western European languages [edit]

The alphabets of the North Germanic languages, Catalan, Finnish, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish are all extensions of the Latin alphabet. The additional characters are typically the ones that become corrupted, making texts only mildly unreadable with mojibake:

• å, ä, ö in Finnish and Swedish
• à, ç, è, é, ï, í, ò, ó, ú, ü in Catalan
• æ, ø, å in Norwegian and Danish
• á, é, ó, ij, è, ë, ï in Dutch
• ä, ö, ü, and ß in German
• á, ð, í, ó, ú, ý, æ, ø in Faroese
• á, ð, é, í, ó, ú, ý, þ, æ, ö in Icelandic
• à, â, ç, è, é, ë, ê, ï, î, ô, ù, û, ü, ÿ, æ, œ in French
• à, è, é, ì, ò, ù in Italian
• á, é, í, ñ, ó, ú, ü, ¡, ¿ in Spanish
• à, á, â, ã, ç, é, ê, í, ó, ô, õ, ú in Portuguese (ü no longer used)
• á, é, í, ó, ú in Irish gaelic
• à, è, ì, ò, ù in Scottish Gaelic
• £ in British English

… and their uppercase counterparts, if applicable.

These are languages for which the ISO-8859-one character set (also known as Latin ane or Western) has been in use. However, ISO-8859-1 has been obsoleted by ii competing standards, the backward compatible Windows-1252, and the slightly contradistinct ISO-8859-15. Both add the Euro sign € and the French œ, merely otherwise any confusion of these three character sets does not create mojibake in these languages. Furthermore, information technology is ever safe to interpret ISO-8859-1 as Windows-1252, and fairly safe to translate information technology equally ISO-8859-15, in particular with respect to the Euro sign, which replaces the rarely used currency sign (¤). Nevertheless, with the advent of UTF-8, mojibake has become more mutual in certain scenarios, east.1000. substitution of text files between UNIX and Windows computers, due to UTF-eight's incompatibility with Latin-ane and Windows-1252. But UTF-8 has the ability to exist directly recognised by a simple algorithm, so that well written software should exist able to avoid mixing UTF-8 up with other encodings, so this was most common when many had software non supporting UTF-viii. Most of these languages were supported by MS-DOS default CP437 and other automobile default encodings, except ASCII, then problems when buying an operating system version were less common. Windows and MS-DOS are not compatible even so.

In Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and German, vowels are rarely repeated, and it is unremarkably obvious when one character gets corrupted, e.g. the 2nd letter in "kÃ⁠¤rlek" ( kärlek , "love"). This way, even though the reader has to estimate between å, ä and ö, well-nigh all texts remain legible. Finnish text, on the other hand, does feature repeating vowels in words like hääyö ("hymeneals night") which tin can sometimes render text very hard to read (e.g. hääyö appears as "hÃ⁠¤Ã⁠¤yÃ⁠¶"). Icelandic and Faroese have x and viii perhaps confounding characters, respectively, which thus tin make it more difficult to estimate corrupted characters; Icelandic words similar þjóðlöð ("outstanding hospitality") get almost entirely unintelligible when rendered as "þjóðlöð".

In German language, Buchstabensalat ("letter salad") is a common term for this phenomenon, and in Castilian, deformación (literally deformation).

Some users transliterate their writing when using a computer, either by omitting the problematic diacritics, or by using digraph replacements (å → aa, ä/æ → ae, ö/ø → oe, ü → ue etc.). Thus, an author might write "ueber" instead of "über", which is standard practice in German when umlauts are non bachelor. The latter practise seems to be better tolerated in the German language sphere than in the Nordic countries. For example, in Norwegian, digraphs are associated with primitive Danish, and may be used jokingly. Still, digraphs are useful in advice with other parts of the globe. As an example, the Norwegian football game player Ole Gunnar Solskjær had his name spelled "SOLSKJAER" on his back when he played for Manchester United.

An artifact of UTF-viii misinterpreted as ISO-8859-1, "Ring 1000000 nÃ¥" (" Band 1000000 nå "), was seen in an SMS scam raging in Norway in June 2014.^[5]

Examples

Swedish case:		Smörgås (open sandwich)
File encoding	Setting in browser	Result
MS-DOS 437	ISO 8859-1	Sm"rg†s
ISO 8859-one	Mac Roman	SmˆrgÂs
UTF-eight	ISO 8859-1	Smörgås
UTF-8	Mac Roman	Smörgås

Central and Eastern European [edit]

Users of Cardinal and Eastern European languages can as well be affected. Because well-nigh computers were non continued to any network during the mid- to late-1980s, there were different character encodings for every linguistic communication with diacritical characters (see ISO/IEC 8859 and KOI-8), oftentimes also varying by operating arrangement.

Hungarian [edit]

Hungarian is another afflicted language, which uses the 26 bones English characters, plus the accented forms á, é, í, ó, ú, ö, ü (all nowadays in the Latin-i character set), plus the two characters ő and ű, which are non in Latin-i. These 2 characters can be correctly encoded in Latin-two, Windows-1250 and Unicode. Before Unicode became common in email clients, eastward-mails containing Hungarian text often had the letters ő and ű corrupted, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability. It is common to answer to an e-mail rendered unreadable (see examples below) by character mangling (referred to as "betűszemét", meaning "letter garbage") with the phrase "Árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép", a nonsense phrase (literally "Flood-resistant mirror-drilling automobile") containing all accented characters used in Hungarian.

Examples [edit]

Source encoding	Target encoding	Issue	Occurrence
Hungarian example		ÁRVÍZTŰRŐ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép	Characters in cherry are incorrect and exercise not match the top-left example.
CP 852	CP 437	╡RV╓ZTδRè TÜKÖRFΘRαGÉP árvízt√rï tükörfúrógép	This was very common in DOS-era when the text was encoded by the Central European CP 852 encoding; yet, the operating arrangement, a software or printer used the default CP 437 encoding. Delight note that small-case letters are mainly correct, exception with ő (ï) and ű (√). Ü/ü is right because CP 852 was fabricated compatible with High german. Nowadays occurs mainly on printed prescriptions and cheques.
CWI-two	CP 437	ÅRVìZTÿRº TÜKÖRFùRòGÉP árvíztûrô tükörfúrógép	The CWI-2 encoding was designed so that the text remains fairly well-readable even if the display or printer uses the default CP 437 encoding. This encoding was heavily used in the 1980s and early 1990s, but nowadays information technology is completely deprecated.
Windows-1250	Windows-1252	ÁRVÍZTÛRÕ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP árvíztûrõ tükörfúrógép	The default Western Windows encoding is used instead of the Cardinal-European one. Just ő-Ő (õ-Õ) and ű-Ű (û-Û) are incorrect, just the text is completely readable. This is the about common fault nowadays; due to ignorance, it occurs often on webpages or fifty-fifty in printed media.
CP 852	Windows-1250	µRVÖZTëRŠ TšG™RFéRŕChiliad P rvˇztűr‹ t k"rfŁr˘g‚p	Central European Windows encoding is used instead of DOS encoding. The use of ű is correct.
Windows-1250	CP 852	┴RV═ZT█RŇ T▄KÍRF┌RËG╔P ßrvÝztűr§ tŘk÷rf˙rˇgÚp	Central European DOS encoding is used instead of Windows encoding. The use of ű is right.
Quoted-printable	7-bit ASCII	=C1RV=CDZT=DBR=D5 T=DCG=D6RF=DAR=D3Chiliad=C9P =E1rv=EDzt=FBr=F5 t=FCk=F6rf=FAr=F3g=E9p	Mainly acquired by wrongly configured post servers but may occur in SMS letters on some cell-phones too.
UTF-eight	Windows-1252	ÁRVÍZTÅ°RŐ TÃœ1000ÖRFÚRÃ"1000ÉP árvÃztűrÅ' tükörfúrómép	Mainly caused by wrongly configured web services or webmail clients, which were non tested for international usage (as the problem remains concealed for English texts). In this case the actual (oftentimes generated) content is in UTF-viii; however, it is non configured in the HTML headers, so the rendering engine displays it with the default Western encoding.

Smooth [edit]

Prior to the creation of ISO 8859-2 in 1987, users of various calculating platforms used their own graphic symbol encodings such as AmigaPL on Amiga, Atari Social club on Atari ST and Masovia, IBM CP852, Mazovia and Windows CP1250 on IBM PCs. Smoothen companies selling early DOS computers created their own mutually-incompatible ways to encode Polish characters and simply reprogrammed the EPROMs of the video cards (typically CGA, EGA, or Hercules) to provide hardware code pages with the needed glyphs for Polish—arbitrarily located without reference to where other computer sellers had placed them.

The situation began to improve when, after pressure from academic and user groups, ISO 8859-2 succeeded as the "Internet standard" with limited support of the dominant vendors' software (today largely replaced by Unicode). With the numerous issues caused past the diversity of encodings, fifty-fifty today some users tend to refer to Polish diacritical characters every bit krzaczki ([kshach-kih], lit. "little shrubs").

Russian and other Cyrillic alphabets [edit]

Mojibake may exist colloquially called krakozyabry ( кракозя́бры [krɐkɐˈzʲæbrɪ̈]) in Russian, which was and remains complicated past several systems for encoding Cyrillic.^{[half dozen]} The Soviet Union and early Russia developed KOI encodings ( Kod Obmena Informatsiey , Код Обмена Информацией , which translates to "Code for Information Exchange"). This began with Cyrillic-just 7-bit KOI7, based on ASCII but with Latin and some other characters replaced with Cyrillic messages. So came 8-bit KOI8 encoding that is an ASCII extension which encodes Cyrillic letters only with high-fleck set octets corresponding to 7-bit codes from KOI7. Information technology is for this reason that KOI8 text, even Russian, remains partially readable after stripping the 8th bit, which was considered as a major advantage in the age of 8BITMIME-unaware email systems. For example, words " Школа русского языка " shkola russkogo yazyka , encoded in KOI8 and and then passed through the high bit stripping process, stop upward rendered as "[KOLA RUSSKOGO qZYKA". Somewhen KOI8 gained different flavors for Russian and Bulgarian (KOI8-R), Ukrainian (KOI8-U), Belarusian (KOI8-RU) and even Tajik (KOI8-T).

Meanwhile, in the Due west, Code page 866 supported Ukrainian and Belarusian as well every bit Russian/Bulgarian in MS-DOS. For Microsoft Windows, Code Folio 1251 added support for Serbian and other Slavic variants of Cyrillic.

Nearly recently, the Unicode encoding includes code points for practically all the characters of all the world'due south languages, including all Cyrillic characters.

Before Unicode, it was necessary to match text encoding with a font using the aforementioned encoding system. Failure to do this produced unreadable gibberish whose specific appearance varied depending on the exact combination of text encoding and font encoding. For example, attempting to view non-Unicode Cyrillic text using a font that is limited to the Latin alphabet, or using the default ("Western") encoding, typically results in text that consists almost entirely of vowels with diacritical marks. (KOI8 " Библиотека " ( biblioteka , library) becomes "âÉÂÌÉÏÔÅËÁ".) Using Windows codepage 1251 to view text in KOI8 or vice versa results in garbled text that consists mostly of capital letters (KOI8 and codepage 1251 share the same ASCII region, only KOI8 has uppercase letters in the region where codepage 1251 has lowercase, and vice versa). In general, Cyrillic gibberish is symptomatic of using the wrong Cyrillic font. During the early years of the Russian sector of the Globe Broad Web, both KOI8 and codepage 1251 were common. As of 2017, i tin can still come across HTML pages in codepage 1251 and, rarely, KOI8 encodings, too as Unicode. (An estimated 1.7% of all web pages worldwide – all languages included – are encoded in codepage 1251.^[7]) Though the HTML standard includes the ability to specify the encoding for whatsoever given spider web page in its source,^[8] this is sometimes neglected, forcing the user to switch encodings in the browser manually.

In Bulgarian, mojibake is often called majmunica ( маймуница ), meaning "monkey'southward [alphabet]". In Serbian, it is called đubre ( ђубре ), pregnant "trash". Unlike the former USSR, Southward Slavs never used something like KOI8, and Lawmaking Page 1251 was the ascendant Cyrillic encoding at that place before Unicode. Therefore, these languages experienced fewer encoding incompatibility troubles than Russian. In the 1980s, Bulgarian computers used their ain MIK encoding, which is superficially like to (although incompatible with) CP866.

Example

Russian example:		Кракозябры ( krakozyabry , garbage characters)
File encoding	Setting in browser	Effect
MS-DOS 855	ISO 8859-one	Æá ÆÖóÞ¢áñ
KOI8-R	ISO 8859-1	ëÒÁËÏÚÑÂÒÙ
UTF-viii	KOI8-R	п я─п╟п╨п╬п╥я▐п╠я─я▀

Yugoslav languages [edit]

Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian (the dialects of the Yugoslav Serbo-Croatian language) and Slovenian add to the basic Latin alphabet the letters š, đ, č, ć, ž, and their capital counterparts Š, Đ, Č, Ć, Ž (merely č/Č, š/Š and ž/Ž in Slovenian; officially, although others are used when needed, mostly in foreign names, also). All of these letters are divers in Latin-ii and Windows-1250, while only some (š, Š, ž, Ž, Đ) exist in the usual OS-default Windows-1252, and are in that location because of some other languages.

Although Mojibake can occur with any of these characters, the letters that are non included in Windows-1252 are much more prone to errors. Thus, even nowadays, "šđčćž ŠĐČĆŽ" is often displayed as "šðèæž ŠÐÈÆŽ", although ð, è, æ, È, Æ are never used in Slavic languages.

When confined to basic ASCII (most user names, for example), common replacements are: š→southward, đ→dj, č→c, ć→c, ž→z (upper-case letter forms analogously, with Đ→Dj or Đ→DJ depending on word example). All of these replacements introduce ambiguities, then reconstructing the original from such a form is usually done manually if required.

The Windows-1252 encoding is important because the English language versions of the Windows operating system are nigh widespread, not localized ones.^{[ citation needed ]} The reasons for this include a relatively small and fragmented market place, increasing the toll of high quality localization, a high degree of software piracy (in plow caused past high price of software compared to income), which discourages localization efforts, and people preferring English versions of Windows and other software.^{[ commendation needed ]}

The drive to differentiate Croatian from Serbian, Bosnian from Croatian and Serbian, and now even Montenegrin from the other 3 creates many problems. In that location are many different localizations, using different standards and of different quality. In that location are no common translations for the vast amount of figurer terminology originating in English. In the end, people use adopted English words ("kompjuter" for "computer", "kompajlirati" for "compile," etc.), and if they are unaccustomed to the translated terms may not understand what some choice in a carte du jour is supposed to practice based on the translated phrase. Therefore, people who understand English language, too equally those who are accustomed to English language terminology (who are nigh, considering English terminology is also mostly taught in schools considering of these problems) regularly choose the original English versions of non-specialist software.

When Cyrillic script is used (for Macedonian and partially Serbian), the problem is similar to other Cyrillic-based scripts.

Newer versions of English Windows allow the code page to be inverse (older versions require special English language versions with this support), but this setting can exist and oft was incorrectly set. For case, Windows 98 and Windows Me can be gear up to near non-right-to-left single-byte code pages including 1250, but just at install fourth dimension.

Caucasian languages [edit]

The writing systems of sure languages of the Caucasus region, including the scripts of Georgian and Armenian, may produce mojibake. This problem is particularly acute in the instance of ArmSCII or ARMSCII, a set up of obsolete graphic symbol encodings for the Armenian alphabet which have been superseded by Unicode standards. ArmSCII is not widely used because of a lack of support in the computer industry. For example, Microsoft Windows does not support it.

Asian encodings [edit]

Another type of mojibake occurs when text is erroneously parsed in a multi-byte encoding, such as one of the encodings for East Asian languages. With this kind of mojibake more than one (typically two) characters are corrupted at once, e.g. "k舐lek" ( kärlek ) in Swedish, where " är " is parsed every bit "舐". Compared to the above mojibake, this is harder to read, since letters unrelated to the problematic å, ä or ö are missing, and is especially problematic for short words starting with å, ä or ö such as "än" (which becomes "舅"). Since two messages are combined, the mojibake also seems more random (over 50 variants compared to the normal three, non counting the rarer capitals). In some rare cases, an entire text string which happens to include a design of particular give-and-take lengths, such equally the sentence "Bush hid the facts", may be misinterpreted.

Vietnamese [edit]

In Vietnamese, the miracle is called chữ ma , loạn mã tin can occur when computer try to encode diacritic character defined in Windows-1258, TCVN3 or VNI to UTF-8. Chữ ma was common in Vietnam when user was using Windows XP computer or using cheap mobile phone.

Instance:		Trăm năm trong cõi người ta (Truyện Kiều, Nguyễn Du)
Original encoding	Target encoding	Result
Windows-1258	UTF-8	Tră1000 năm trong cõi người ta
TCVN3	UTF-eight	Tr¨m n¨1000 trong câi ngêi ta
VNI (Windows)	UTF-8	Traêm naêm trong coõi ngöôøi ta

Japanese [edit]

In Japanese, the aforementioned phenomenon is, as mentioned, called mojibake ( 文字化け ). It is a particular problem in Japan due to the numerous dissimilar encodings that be for Japanese text. Alongside Unicode encodings like UTF-8 and UTF-16, there are other standard encodings, such as Shift-JIS (Windows machines) and EUC-JP (UNIX systems). Mojibake, equally well equally beingness encountered by Japanese users, is also oftentimes encountered by non-Japanese when attempting to run software written for the Japanese market place.

Chinese [edit]

In Chinese, the same phenomenon is called Luàn mǎ (Pinyin, Simplified Chinese 乱码 , Traditional Chinese 亂碼 , meaning 'chaotic code'), and tin occur when computerised text is encoded in 1 Chinese grapheme encoding but is displayed using the wrong encoding. When this occurs, it is ofttimes possible to prepare the issue by switching the graphic symbol encoding without loss of data. The state of affairs is complicated because of the beingness of several Chinese character encoding systems in use, the most common ones being: Unicode, Big5, and Guobiao (with several backward compatible versions), and the possibility of Chinese characters existence encoded using Japanese encoding.

It is easy to identify the original encoding when luanma occurs in Guobiao encodings:

Original encoding	Viewed as	Effect	Original text	Annotation
Big5	GB	?T瓣в变巨肚	三國志曹操傳	Garbled Chinese characters with no hint of original significant. The cerise graphic symbol is not a valid codepoint in GB2312.
Shift-JIS	GB	暥帤壔偗僥僗僩	文字化けテスト	Kana is displayed every bit characters with the radical 亻, while kanji are other characters. Near of them are extremely uncommon and not in practical use in modern Chinese.
EUC-KR	GB	叼力捞钙胶 抛农聪墨	디제이맥스 테크니카	Random mutual Simplified Chinese characters which in most cases make no sense. Easily identifiable considering of spaces between every several characters.

An additional trouble is caused when encodings are missing characters, which is common with rare or antiquated characters that are still used in personal or identify names. Examples of this are Taiwanese politicians Wang Chien-shien (Chinese: 王建煊; pinyin: Wáng Jiànxuān )'s "煊", Yu Shyi-kun (simplified Chinese: 游锡堃; traditional Chinese: 游錫堃; pinyin: Yóu Xíkūn )'southward "堃" and vocalizer David Tao (Chinese: 陶喆; pinyin: Táo Zhé )'s "喆" missing in Big5, ex-PRC Premier Zhu Rongji (Chinese: 朱镕基; pinyin: Zhū Róngjī )'southward "镕" missing in GB2312, copyright symbol "©" missing in GBK.^[nine]

Newspapers have dealt with this trouble in various ways, including using software to combine two existing, similar characters; using a film of the personality; or merely substituting a homophone for the rare character in the hope that the reader would be able to make the correct inference.

Indic text [edit]

A similar upshot tin can occur in Brahmic or Indic scripts of South Asia, used in such Indo-Aryan or Indic languages as Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu), Bengali, Panjabi, Marathi, and others, even if the character set employed is properly recognized past the application. This is considering, in many Indic scripts, the rules by which private letter symbols combine to create symbols for syllables may non be properly understood by a computer missing the appropriate software, even if the glyphs for the individual letter forms are available.

One instance of this is the old Wikipedia logo, which attempts to evidence the character analogous to "wi" (the first syllable of "Wikipedia") on each of many puzzle pieces. The puzzle piece meant to acquit the Devanagari character for "wi" instead used to brandish the "wa" character followed by an unpaired "i" modifier vowel, easily recognizable equally mojibake generated by a computer not configured to display Indic text.^[x] The logo as redesigned every bit of May 2010^[ref] has stock-still these errors.

The thought of Obviously Text requires the operating organization to provide a font to display Unicode codes. This font is different from Os to OS for Singhala and information technology makes orthographically incorrect glyphs for some messages (syllables) across all operating systems. For case, the 'reph', the curt class for 'r' is a diacritic that normally goes on top of a plain letter. Even so, it is wrong to go on superlative of some letters similar 'ya' or 'la' in specific contexts. For Sanskritic words or names inherited by modern languages, such equally कार्य, IAST: kārya, or आर्या, IAST: āryā, information technology is apt to put it on top of these messages. By dissimilarity, for like sounds in modern languages which effect from their specific rules, information technology is not put on peak, such equally the give-and-take करणाऱ्या, IAST: karaṇāryā, a stalk form of the mutual word करणारा/री, IAST: karaṇārā/rī, in the Marathi language.^[xi] Simply it happens in almost operating systems. This appears to exist a fault of internal programming of the fonts. In Mac OS and iOS, the muurdhaja fifty (nighttime l) and 'u' combination and its long form both yield incorrect shapes.^{[ commendation needed ]}

Some Indic and Indic-derived scripts, most notably Lao, were not officially supported by Windows XP until the release of Vista.^[12] Nevertheless, various sites have made complimentary-to-download fonts.

Burmese [edit]

Due to Western sanctions^[13] and the belatedly arrival of Burmese language support in computers,^{[14] [xv]} much of the early Burmese localization was homegrown without international cooperation. The prevailing means of Burmese support is via the Zawgyi font, a font that was created as a Unicode font but was in fact but partially Unicode compliant.^[15] In the Zawgyi font, some codepoints for Burmese script were implemented as specified in Unicode, but others were not.^[sixteen] The Unicode Consortium refers to this as advertising hoc font encodings.^[17] With the appearance of mobile phones, mobile vendors such equally Samsung and Huawei simply replaced the Unicode compliant system fonts with Zawgyi versions.^[14]

Due to these advertising hoc encodings, communications between users of Zawgyi and Unicode would render as garbled text. To get around this issue, content producers would brand posts in both Zawgyi and Unicode.^[eighteen] Myanmar authorities has designated 1 October 2019 as "U-Day" to officially switch to Unicode.^[thirteen] The full transition is estimated to take 2 years.^[19]

African languages [edit]

In sure writing systems of Africa, unencoded text is unreadable. Texts that may produce mojibake include those from the Horn of Africa such every bit the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia and Eritrea, used for Amharic, Tigre, and other languages, and the Somali language, which employs the Osmanya alphabet. In Southern Africa, the Mwangwego alphabet is used to write languages of Malawi and the Mandombe alphabet was created for the Congo-kinshasa, but these are not more often than not supported. Various other writing systems native to West Africa present similar bug, such every bit the North'Ko alphabet, used for Manding languages in Republic of guinea, and the Vai syllabary, used in Liberia.

Arabic [edit]

Another affected language is Standard arabic (come across below). The text becomes unreadable when the encodings do non match.

Examples [edit]

File encoding	Setting in browser	Result
Arabic example:		(Universal Announcement of Human being Rights)
Browser rendering:		الإعلان العالمى لحقوق الإنسان
UTF-viii	Windows-1252	الإعلان العالمى لحقوق الإنسان
	KOI8-R	О╩©ь╖ы└ь╔ь╧ы└ь╖ы├ ь╖ы└ь╧ь╖ы└ы┘ы┴ ы└ь╜ы┌ы┬ы┌ ь╖ы└ь╔ы├ьЁь╖ы├
	ISO 8859-5	яЛПиЇй�иЅиЙй�иЇй� иЇй�иЙиЇй�й�й� й�ий�й�й� иЇй�иЅй�иГиЇй�
	CP 866	я╗┐╪з┘Д╪е╪╣┘Д╪з┘Ж ╪з┘Д╪╣╪з┘Д┘Е┘Й ┘Д╪н┘В┘И┘В ╪з┘Д╪е┘Ж╪│╪з┘Ж
	ISO 8859-half dozen	ُ؛؟ظ�ع�ظ�ظ�ع�ظ�ع� ظ�ع�ظ�ظ�ع�ع�ع� ع�ظع�ع�ع� ظ�ع�ظ�ع�ظ�ظ�ع�
	ISO 8859-2	اŮ�ŘĽŘšŮ�اŮ� اŮ�ؚاŮ�Ů�Ů� Ů�ŘŮ�Ů�Ů� اŮ�ŘĽŮ�ساŮ�
Windows-1256	Windows-1252	ÇáÅÚáÇä ÇáÚÇáãì áÍÞæÞ ÇáÅäÓÇä

The examples in this article exercise not have UTF-8 as browser setting, because UTF-viii is easily recognisable, so if a browser supports UTF-8 it should recognise it automatically, and not attempt to interpret something else as UTF-viii.

See besides [edit]

• Code point
• Replacement character
• Substitute grapheme
• Newline – The conventions for representing the line break differ between Windows and Unix systems. Though virtually software supports both conventions (which is trivial), software that must preserve or display the departure (due east.g. version control systems and data comparison tools) tin get substantially more difficult to use if not adhering to one convention.
• Byte order mark – The about in-band way to store the encoding together with the data – prepend it. This is past intention invisible to humans using compliant software, but will past design be perceived every bit "garbage characters" to incompliant software (including many interpreters).
• HTML entities – An encoding of special characters in HTML, mostly optional, only required for certain characters to escape interpretation as markup.

  While failure to apply this transformation is a vulnerability (see cross-site scripting), applying it also many times results in garbling of these characters. For example, the quotation mark " becomes ", ", " and so on.

• Bush hid the facts

References [edit]

1. ^ ^{a b} King, Ritchie (2012). "Will unicode soon exist the universal code? [The Data]". IEEE Spectrum. 49 (vii): 60. doi:10.1109/MSPEC.2012.6221090.
2. ^ WINDISCHMANN, Stephan (31 March 2004). "curl -5 linux.ars (Internationalization)". Ars Technica . Retrieved 5 October 2018.
3. ^ "Guidelines for extended attributes". 2013-05-17. Retrieved 2015-02-15 .
4. ^ "Unicode mailinglist on the Eudora email client". 2001-05-thirteen. Retrieved 2014-11-01 .
5. ^ "sms-scam". June eighteen, 2014. Retrieved June 19, 2014.
6. ^ p. 141, Control + Alt + Delete: A Dictionary of Cyberslang, Jonathon Keats, World Pequot, 2007, ISBN ane-59921-039-8.
7. ^ "Usage of Windows-1251 for websites".
8. ^ "Declaring grapheme encodings in HTML".
9. ^ "PRC GBK (XGB)". Microsoft. Archived from the original on 2002-x-01. Conversion map betwixt Code page 936 and Unicode. Need manually selecting GB18030 or GBK in browser to view it correctly.
10. ^ Cohen, Noam (June 25, 2007). "Some Errors Defy Fixes: A Typo in Wikipedia's Logo Fractures the Sanskrit". The New York Times . Retrieved July 17, 2009.
11. ^ https://marä thi.indiatyping.com/
12. ^ "Content Moved (Windows)". Msdn.microsoft.com. Retrieved 2014-02-05 .
13. ^ ^{a b} "Unicode in, Zawgyi out: Modernity finally catches up in Myanmar's digital world". The Japan Times. 27 September 2019. Retrieved 24 Dec 2019. Oct. one is "U-Twenty-four hour period", when Myanmar officially will adopt the new organisation.... Microsoft and Apple tree helped other countries standardize years ago, only Western sanctions meant Myanmar lost out.
14. ^ ^{a b} Hotchkiss, Griffin (March 23, 2016). "Battle of the fonts". Frontier Myanmar . Retrieved 24 December 2019. With the release of Windows XP service pack 2, complex scripts were supported, which fabricated it possible for Windows to render a Unicode-compliant Burmese font such as Myanmar1 (released in 2005). ... Myazedi, BIT, and subsequently Zawgyi, circumscribed the rendering problem by adding actress code points that were reserved for Myanmar'southward ethnic languages. Non only does the re-mapping prevent hereafter ethnic language back up, it likewise results in a typing system that can be confusing and inefficient, even for experienced users. ... Huawei and Samsung, the ii most popular smartphone brands in Myanmar, are motivated just past capturing the largest market share, which means they support Zawgyi out of the box.
15. ^ ^{a b} Sin, Thant (7 September 2019). "Unified under one font arrangement every bit Myanmar prepares to migrate from Zawgyi to Unicode". Rise Voices . Retrieved 24 December 2019. Standard Myanmar Unicode fonts were never mainstreamed unlike the individual and partially Unicode compliant Zawgyi font. ... Unicode volition improve natural language processing
16. ^ "Why Unicode is Needed". Google Code: Zawgyi Project . Retrieved 31 Oct 2013.
17. ^ "Myanmar Scripts and Languages". Oftentimes Asked Questions. Unicode Consortium. Retrieved 24 Dec 2019. "UTF-8" technically does not apply to ad hoc font encodings such as Zawgyi.
18. ^ LaGrow, Nick; Pruzan, Miri (September 26, 2019). "Integrating autoconversion: Facebook's path from Zawgyi to Unicode - Facebook Engineering science". Facebook Engineering. Facebook. Retrieved 25 December 2019. It makes communication on digital platforms difficult, equally content written in Unicode appears garbled to Zawgyi users and vice versa. ... In order to better reach their audiences, content producers in Myanmar often post in both Zawgyi and Unicode in a single mail service, not to mention English or other languages.
19. ^ Saw Yi Nanda (21 November 2019). "Myanmar switch to Unicode to accept two years: app developer". The Myanmar Times . Retrieved 24 Dec 2019.

External links [edit]

rheationcy.blogspot.com

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake

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