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Garbled text as a effect of incorrect grapheme encoding

Mojibake (Japanese: 文字化け; IPA: [mod͡ʑibake]) is the garbled text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding.^[1] The result is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, frequently from a different writing organization.

This display may include the generic replacement grapheme ("�") in places where the binary representation is considered invalid. A replacement tin as well involve multiple consecutive symbols, as viewed in ane encoding, when the same binary code constitutes 1 symbol in the other encoding. This is either because of differing constant length encoding (as in Asian 16-fleck encodings vs European 8-bit encodings), or the apply of variable length encodings (notably UTF-8 and UTF-xvi).

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

Etymology [edit]

Mojibake means "character 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 between the encoded data and the notion of its encoding must exist preserved. As mojibake is the example of non-compliance between these, information technology can be achieved past manipulating the data itself, or just relabeling it.

Mojibake is frequently seen with text data that have been tagged with a wrong encoding; it may non even be tagged at all, simply moved between computers with different default encodings. A major source of trouble are advice protocols that rely on settings on each figurer rather than sending or storing metadata together with the information.

The differing default settings between computers are in part due to differing deployments of Unicode among operating system families, and partly the legacy encodings' specializations for different writing systems of human languages. Whereas Linux distributions mostly switched to UTF-eight in 2004,^[2] Microsoft Windows generally uses UTF-16, and sometimes uses viii-bit lawmaking pages for text files in different languages.^{[ dubious – discuss ]}

For some writing systems, an example existence Japanese, several encodings accept historically been employed, causing users to see mojibake relatively often. Every bit a Japanese example, the word mojibake "文字化け" stored as 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 equally Shift JIS. This is farther exacerbated if other locales are involved: the same UTF-viii text appears as "文字化ã'" in software that assumes text to be in the Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 encodings, usually labelled Western, or (for instance) as "鏂囧瓧鍖栥亼" if interpreted as beingness in a GBK (Mainland Red china) 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 as GBK encoding	矢		机		步		け

Underspecification [edit]

If the encoding is not specified, information technology is up to the software to decide it by 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-and so-uncommon scenarios.

The encoding of text files is affected past locale setting, which depends on the user'southward language, make of operating organisation and possibly other conditions. Therefore, the assumed encoding is systematically wrong for files that come up from a computer with a unlike setting, or even from a differently localized software within the aforementioned system. For Unicode, one solution is to use a byte social club marking, but for source code and other machine readable text, many parsers don't tolerate this. Another is storing the encoding as metadata in the file arrangement. File systems that back up extended file attributes can store this as user.charset.^[3] This likewise requires back up in software that wants to take advantage of it, merely does not disturb other software.

While a few encodings are easy to detect, in particular UTF-8, in that location are many that are difficult to distinguish (come across charset detection). A spider web browser may not be able to distinguish a page coded in EUC-JP and another in Shift-JIS if the coding scheme is not assigned explicitly using HTTP headers sent along with the documents, or using the HTML document's meta tags that are used to substitute for missing HTTP headers if the server cannot be configured to ship the proper HTTP headers; see character encodings in HTML.

Mis-specification [edit]

Mojibake as well occurs when the encoding is wrongly specified. This often happens between encodings that are similar. For example, the Eudora email client for Windows was known to ship emails labelled as ISO-8859-i that were in reality Windows-1252.^[4] The Mac Bone version of Eudora did non exhibit this behaviour. Windows-1252 contains extra printable characters in the C1 range (the most oftentimes seen being curved quotation marks and actress dashes), that were not displayed properly in software complying with the ISO standard; this specially affected software running under other operating systems such as Unix.

Human ignorance [edit]

Of the encodings yet in employ, many are partially compatible with each other, with ASCII as the predominant mutual subset. This sets the stage for man ignorance:

• Compatibility can be a deceptive property, as the common subset of characters is unaffected by a mixup of ii encodings (see Problems in different writing systems).
• People recollect they are using ASCII, and tend to label whatever superset of ASCII they actually use every bit "ASCII". Maybe for simplification, but even in academic literature, the word "ASCII" can be institute used as an example of something not compatible with Unicode, where plainly "ASCII" is Windows-1252 and "Unicode" is UTF-8.^[ane] Notation that UTF-eight is backwards compatible with ASCII.

Overspecification [edit]

When there are layers of protocols, each trying to specify the encoding based on different information, the to the lowest degree certain information may exist misleading to the recipient. For case, consider a spider web server serving a static HTML file over HTTP. The character set may be communicated to the customer in whatsoever number of three means:

• in the HTTP header. This information can exist based on server configuration (for example, when serving a file off disk) 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 announcement. This is the encoding that the author meant to save the particular file in.
• in the file, as a byte order mark. This is the encoding that the author's editor really saved it in. Unless an accidental encoding conversion has happened (by opening information technology in one encoding and saving it in another), this will be correct. It is, withal, simply available in Unicode encodings such as UTF-8 or UTF-16.

Lack of hardware or software support [edit]

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

Resolutions [edit]

Applications using UTF-8 as a default encoding may achieve a greater caste of interoperability because of its widespread use and astern compatibility with Us-ASCII. UTF-8 too has the ability to be straight recognised by a unproblematic algorithm, so that well written software should exist able to avert mixing UTF-8 upwards with other encodings.

The difficulty of resolving an instance of mojibake varies depending on the application inside which it occurs and the causes of it. Two of the most common applications in which mojibake may occur are spider web browsers and word processors. Modern browsers and word processors often support a wide array of grapheme encodings. Browsers oft allow a user to alter their rendering engine's encoding setting on the wing, while word processors allow the user to select the appropriate encoding when opening a file. Information technology may take some trial and error for users to detect the correct encoding.

The problem gets more complicated when information technology occurs in an application that unremarkably does non support a wide range of graphic symbol encoding, such as in a non-Unicode figurer game. In this example, the user must change the operating system's encoding settings to match that of the game. Notwithstanding, changing the system-wide encoding settings can also cause Mojibake in pre-existing applications. In Windows XP or after, a user also has the choice to apply Microsoft AppLocale, an application that allows the changing of per-application locale settings. Even and then, changing the operating organization encoding settings is not possible on earlier operating systems such equally Windows 98; to resolve this issue on earlier operating systems, a user would accept to use third party font rendering applications.

Bug in different writing systems [edit]

English [edit]

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

Some computers did, in older eras, have vendor-specific encodings which caused mismatch also for English language text. Commodore make 8-fleck computers used PETSCII encoding, peculiarly 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 messages. IBM mainframes use the EBCDIC encoding which does non friction match ASCII at all.

Other Western European languages [edit]

The alphabets of the North Germanic languages, Catalan, Finnish, German language, French, Portuguese and Spanish are all extensions of the Latin alphabet. The additional characters are typically the ones that become corrupted, making texts just 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
• à, è, ì, ò, ù in Scottish Gaelic
• £ in British English

… and their uppercase counterparts, if applicative.

These are languages for which the ISO-8859-ane character fix (as well known every bit Latin i or Western) has been in utilise. However, ISO-8859-1 has been obsoleted by 2 competing standards, the backward uniform Windows-1252, and the slightly altered ISO-8859-xv. Both add the Euro sign € and the French œ, but otherwise any confusion of these 3 character sets does not create mojibake in these languages. Furthermore, it is always rubber to translate ISO-8859-one as Windows-1252, and fairly condom to interpret it as ISO-8859-15, in particular with respect to the Euro sign, which replaces the rarely used currency sign (¤). However, with the advent of UTF-eight, mojibake has go more mutual in certain scenarios, e.g. substitution of text files between UNIX and Windows computers, due to UTF-eight's incompatibility with Latin-1 and Windows-1252. But UTF-8 has the ability to be direct recognised by a simple algorithm, and then that well written software should exist able to avoid mixing UTF-viii up with other encodings, so this was virtually common when many had software non supporting UTF-viii. About of these languages were supported by MS-DOS default CP437 and other machine default encodings, except ASCII, then problems when buying an operating system version were less common. Windows and MS-DOS are not uniform all the same.

In Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and German, vowels are rarely repeated, and it is usually obvious when 1 grapheme gets corrupted, e.1000. the 2nd letter of the alphabet in "kÃ⁠¤rlek" ( kärlek , "love"). This way, fifty-fifty though the reader has to guess between å, ä and ö, near all texts remain legible. Finnish text, on the other hand, does feature repeating vowels in words similar hääyö ("wedding night") which tin sometimes render text very hard to read (due east.yard. hääyö appears equally "hÃ⁠¤Ã⁠¤yÃ⁠¶"). Icelandic and Faroese have ten and 8 mayhap confounding characters, respectively, which thus can make it more difficult to estimate corrupted characters; Icelandic words similar þjóðlöð ("outstanding hospitality") become almost entirely unintelligible when rendered as "þjóðlöð".

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

Some users transliterate their writing when using a calculator, either past 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 not available. The latter do seems to exist better tolerated in the German language sphere than in the Nordic countries. For example, in Norwegian, digraphs are associated with archaic Danish, and may be used jokingly. Nonetheless, digraphs are useful in communication with other parts of the earth. Every bit an example, the Norwegian football thespian Ole Gunnar Solskjær had his name spelled "SOLSKJAER" on his dorsum when he played for Manchester United.

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

Examples

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

Central and Eastern European [edit]

Users of Central and Eastern European languages tin can also be affected. Considering near computers were not connected to whatever network during the mid- to late-1980s, at that place were different grapheme encodings for every linguistic communication with diacritical characters (see ISO/IEC 8859 and KOI-viii), often also varying past operating system.

Hungarian [edit]

Hungarian is another affected linguistic communication, which uses the 26 bones English characters, plus the absolute forms á, é, í, ó, ú, ö, ü (all present in the Latin-one graphic symbol set), plus the 2 characters ő and ű, which are not in Latin-1. These 2 characters can be correctly encoded in Latin-2, Windows-1250 and Unicode. Earlier Unicode became common in email clients, due east-mails containing Hungarian text often had the letters ő and ű corrupted, sometimes to the betoken of unrecognizability. Information technology is common to respond to an electronic 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 machine") containing all absolute characters used in Hungarian.

Examples [edit]

Source encoding	Target encoding	Issue	Occurrence
Hungarian example		ÁRVÍZTŰRŐ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép	Characters in red are incorrect and exercise not match the tiptop-left example.
CP 852	CP 437	╡RV╓ZTδRè TÜKÖRFΘRαGÉP árvízt√rï tükörfúrógép	This was very common in DOS-era when the text was encoded past the Central European CP 852 encoding; however, the operating system, a software or printer used the default CP 437 encoding. Please note that small-instance messages are mainly correct, exception with ő (ï) and ű (√). Ü/ü is correct because CP 852 was made compatible with German. Nowadays occurs mainly on printed prescriptions and cheques.
CWI-ii	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, merely nowadays it is completely deprecated.
Windows-1250	Windows-1252	ÁRVÍZTÛRÕ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP árvíztûrõ tükörfúrógép	The default Western Windows encoding is used instead of the Central-European i. Just ő-Ő (õ-Õ) and ű-Ű (û-Û) are wrong, but the text is completely readable. This is the nearly common mistake nowadays; due to ignorance, it occurs often on webpages or even in printed media.
CP 852	Windows-1250	µRVÖZTëRŠ TšG™RFéRŕThousand P rvˇztűr‹ t thousand"rfŁr˘k‚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▄ThousandÍRF┌RËThousand╔P ßrvÝztűr§ tŘgrand÷rf˙rˇgÚp	Cardinal European DOS encoding is used instead of Windows encoding. The apply of ű is right.
Quoted-printable	7-fleck ASCII	=C1RV=CDZT=DBR=D5 T=DCGrand=D6RF=DAR=D3Chiliad=C9P =E1rv=EDzt=FBr=F5 t=FCk=F6rf=FAr=F3g=E9p	Mainly acquired past wrongly configured mail servers but may occur in SMS messages on some cell-phones as well.
UTF-8	Windows-1252	ÁRVÍZTÅ°RŐ TÃœKÖRFÚRÃ"KÉP árvÃztűrÅ' tükörfúrómép	Mainly acquired by wrongly configured web services or webmail clients, which were not tested for international usage (as the problem remains curtained for English language texts). In this example the actual (often generated) content is in UTF-eight; however, it is not configured in the HTML headers, so the rendering engine displays it with the default Western encoding.

Polish [edit]

Prior to the cosmos of ISO 8859-2 in 1987, users of diverse computing platforms used their ain grapheme encodings such as AmigaPL on Amiga, Atari Society on Atari ST and Masovia, IBM CP852, Mazovia and Windows CP1250 on IBM PCs. Smooth companies selling early on 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 back up of the dominant vendors' software (today largely replaced by Unicode). With the numerous problems caused by the variety of encodings, fifty-fifty today some users tend to refer to Polish diacritical characters as krzaczki ([kshach-kih], lit. "little shrubs").

Russian and other Cyrillic alphabets [edit]

Mojibake may be colloquially chosen krakozyabry ( кракозя́бры [krɐkɐˈzʲæbrɪ̈]) in Russian, which was and remains complicated by several systems for encoding Cyrillic.^[six] The Soviet Marriage and early Russia developed KOI encodings ( Kod Obmena Informatsiey , Код Обмена Информацией , which translates to "Code for Data Commutation"). This began with Cyrillic-only seven-bit KOI7, based on ASCII but with Latin and some other characters replaced with Cyrillic letters. And so came 8-bit KOI8 encoding that is an ASCII extension which encodes Cyrillic letters only with loftier-chip gear up octets respective to seven-chip codes from KOI7. It is for this reason that KOI8 text, even Russian, remains partially readable after stripping the eighth flake, which was considered as a major reward in the historic period of 8BITMIME-unaware e-mail systems. For example, words " Школа русского языка " shkola russkogo yazyka , encoded in KOI8 and and then passed through the high bit stripping process, end up rendered as "[KOLA RUSSKOGO qZYKA". Eventually KOI8 gained different flavors for Russian and Bulgarian (KOI8-R), Ukrainian (KOI8-U), Belarusian (KOI8-RU) and even Tajik (KOI8-T).

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

Most recently, the Unicode encoding includes code points for practically all the characters of all the world's languages, including all Cyrillic characters.

Earlier Unicode, information technology was necessary to match text encoding with a font using the same encoding system. Failure to exercise this produced unreadable gibberish whose specific advent 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 express to the Latin alphabet, or using the default ("Western") encoding, typically results in text that consists about 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 generally of capital letters (KOI8 and codepage 1251 share the same ASCII region, but 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 World wide web, both KOI8 and codepage 1251 were common. As of 2017, one tin withal see HTML pages in codepage 1251 and, rarely, KOI8 encodings, likewise as Unicode. (An estimated i.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 any given web folio in its source,^[8] this is sometimes neglected, forcing the user to switch encodings in the browser manually.

In Bulgarian, mojibake is oftentimes called majmunica ( маймуница ), significant "monkey'south [alphabet]". In Serbian, information technology is called đubre ( ђубре ), meaning "trash". Unlike the old USSR, S Slavs never used something similar KOI8, and Code Page 1251 was the ascendant Cyrillic encoding there earlier Unicode. Therefore, these languages experienced fewer encoding incompatibility troubles than Russian. In the 1980s, Bulgarian computers used their own MIK encoding, which is superficially similar to (although incompatible with) CP866.

Instance

Russian example:		Кракозябры ( krakozyabry , garbage characters)
File encoding	Setting in browser	Consequence
MS-DOS 855	ISO 8859-1	Æá ÆÖóÞ¢áñ
KOI8-R	ISO 8859-ane	ëÒÁËÏÚÑÂÒÙ
UTF-8	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 linguistic communication) and Slovenian add to the bones Latin alphabet the letters š, đ, č, ć, ž, and their uppercase counterparts Š, Đ, Č, Ć, Ž (only č/Č, š/Š and ž/Ž in Slovenian; officially, although others are used when needed, mostly in foreign names, as well). All of these messages are divers in Latin-two and Windows-1250, while only some (š, Š, ž, Ž, Đ) exist in the usual OS-default Windows-1252, and are there because of some other languages.

Although Mojibake tin occur with any of these characters, the letters that are not 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 (nearly user names, for example), common replacements are: š→due south, đ→dj, č→c, ć→c, ž→z (capital forms analogously, with Đ→Dj or Đ→DJ depending on word instance). All of these replacements introduce ambiguities, so reconstructing the original from such a class is ordinarily washed manually if required.

The Windows-1252 encoding is of import because the English versions of the Windows operating system are most widespread, not localized ones.^{[ citation needed ]} The reasons for this include a relatively modest and fragmented market, increasing the price of high quality localization, a high caste of software piracy (in turn acquired by high toll 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 Croation and Serbian, and now even Montenegrin from the other three creates many problems. There are many dissimilar localizations, using dissimilar standards and of different quality. There are no common translations for the vast amount of computer terminology originating in English. In the end, people employ adopted English words ("kompjuter" for "computer", "kompajlirati" for "compile," etc.), and if they are unaccustomed to the translated terms may not understand what some selection in a bill of fare is supposed to practise based on the translated phrase. Therefore, people who understand English, also as those who are accustomed to English terminology (who are about, considering English terminology is also more often than not taught in schools because of these problems) regularly choose the original English language versions of not-specialist software.

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

Newer versions of English Windows allow the code page to be changed (older versions require special English versions with this support), but this setting tin be and ofttimes was incorrectly set. For example, Windows 98 and Windows Me can be set to most not-right-to-left single-byte lawmaking pages including 1250, but but at install time.

Caucasian languages [edit]

The writing systems of certain languages of the Caucasus region, including the scripts of Georgian and Armenian, may produce mojibake. This problem is particularly astute in the case of ArmSCII or ARMSCII, a set of obsolete character encodings for the Armenian alphabet which take been superseded past Unicode standards. ArmSCII is not widely used considering of a lack of support in the calculator industry. For instance, Microsoft Windows does not back up it.

Asian encodings [edit]

Another blazon 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 ii) characters are corrupted at one time, due east.g. "k舐lek" ( kärlek ) in Swedish, where " är " is parsed as "舐". Compared to the to a higher place mojibake, this is harder to read, since messages unrelated to the problematic å, ä or ö are missing, and is peculiarly problematic for brusk words starting with å, ä or ö such as "än" (which becomes "舅"). Since two letters are combined, the mojibake likewise seems more than random (over 50 variants compared to the normal three, not counting the rarer capitals). In some rare cases, an entire text string which happens to include a design of particular discussion lengths, such as the judgement "Bush-league hid the facts", may be misinterpreted.

Vietnamese [edit]

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

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

Japanese [edit]

In Japanese, the aforementioned phenomenon is, every bit mentioned, called mojibake ( 文字化け ). It is a particular problem in Japan due to the numerous unlike encodings that exist for Japanese text. Aslope 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, as well as existence encountered by Japanese users, is also ofttimes encountered by not-Japanese when attempting to run software written for the Japanese market.

Chinese [edit]

In Chinese, the same miracle is called Luàn mǎ (Pinyin, Simplified Chinese 乱码 , Traditional Chinese 亂碼 , meaning 'chaotic code'), and can occur when computerised text is encoded in i Chinese character encoding but is displayed using the wrong encoding. When this occurs, it is often possible to fix the upshot by switching the character encoding without loss of data. The state of affairs is complicated because of the existence of several Chinese character encoding systems in use, the about mutual ones being: Unicode, Big5, and Guobiao (with several astern uniform versions), and the possibility of Chinese characters being encoded using Japanese encoding.

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

Original encoding	Viewed every bit	Result	Original text	Notation
Big5	GB	?T瓣в变巨肚	三國志曹操傳	Garbled Chinese characters with no hint of original meaning. The ruby character is non 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 equally characters with the radical 亻, while kanji are other characters. Most of them are extremely uncommon and not in practical use in modernistic Chinese.
EUC-KR	GB	叼力捞钙胶 抛农聪墨	디제이맥스 테크니카	Random common Simplified Chinese characters which in most cases make no sense. Hands identifiable because of spaces between every several characters.

An additional problem is caused when encodings are missing characters, which is mutual with rare or antiquated characters that are notwithstanding used in personal or place 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 )'due south "堃" and singer David Tao (Chinese: 陶喆; pinyin: Táo Zhé )'south "喆" missing in Big5, ex-Cathay Premier Zhu Rongji (Chinese: 朱镕基; pinyin: Zhū Róngjī )'due south "镕" missing in GB2312, copyright symbol "©" missing in GBK.^[nine]

Newspapers take dealt with this problem in various means, including using software to combine two existing, similar characters; using a picture of the personality; or only 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 effect can occur in Brahmic or Indic scripts of South asia, used in such Indo-Aryan or Indic languages equally Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu), Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, and others, fifty-fifty if the character set employed is properly recognized by the application. This is because, in many Indic scripts, the rules by which individual letter symbols combine to create symbols for syllables may not be properly understood by a computer missing the appropriate software, even if the glyphs for the individual letter forms are available.

One example of this is the old Wikipedia logo, which attempts to bear witness the character coordinating to "wi" (the showtime syllable of "Wikipedia") on each of many puzzle pieces. The puzzle piece meant to bear the Devanagari graphic symbol for "wi" instead used to display the "wa" character followed past an unpaired "i" modifier vowel, easily recognizable as mojibake generated by a computer not configured to display Indic text.^[10] The logo as redesigned equally of May 2010^[ref] has stock-still these errors.

The idea of Plain Text requires the operating arrangement to provide a font to display Unicode codes. This font is different from OS to Bone for Singhala and it makes orthographically incorrect glyphs for some letters (syllables) beyond all operating systems. For instance, the 'reph', the short form for 'r' is a diacritic that normally goes on top of a evidently letter. However, it is wrong to go on top of some letters similar 'ya' or 'la' in specific contexts. For Sanskritic words or names inherited by modernistic languages, such equally कार्य, IAST: kārya, or आर्या, IAST: āryā, it is apt to put it on top of these letters. By contrast, for like sounds in modern languages which result from their specific rules, it is not put on top, such every bit the word करणाऱ्या, IAST: karaṇāryā, a stem course of the mutual word करणारा/री, IAST: karaṇārā/rī, in the Marathi language.^[xi] Only it happens in most operating systems. This appears to exist a fault of internal programming of the fonts. In Mac OS and iOS, the muurdhaja l (dark l) and 'u' combination and its long course both yield wrong shapes.^{[ citation 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,^{[xiv] [xv]} much of the early Burmese localization was homegrown without international cooperation. The prevailing means of Burmese back up is via the Zawgyi font, a font that was created as a Unicode font but was in fact just partially Unicode compliant.^[fifteen] In the Zawgyi font, some codepoints for Burmese script were implemented as specified in Unicode, but others were non.^[16] The Unicode Consortium refers to this every bit ad hoc font encodings.^[17] With the appearance of mobile phones, mobile vendors such every bit Samsung and Huawei only replaced the Unicode compliant system fonts with Zawgyi versions.^[14]

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

African languages [edit]

In certain writing systems of Africa, unencoded text is unreadable. Texts that may produce mojibake include those from the Horn of Africa such as the Ge'ez script in Federal democratic republic of ethiopia and Eritrea, used for Amharic, Tigre, and other languages, and the Somali linguistic communication, 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 Democratic Republic of the Congo, just these are non mostly supported. Various other writing systems native to Westward Africa present like issues, such every bit the N'Ko alphabet, used for Manding languages in Guinea, and the Vai syllabary, used in Liberia.

Standard arabic [edit]

Some other affected language is Arabic (come across below). The text becomes unreadable when the encodings exercise not lucifer.

Examples [edit]

File encoding	Setting in browser	Event
Arabic example:		(Universal Declaration of Human 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 8859-6	ُ؛؟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-two	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-8 is easily recognisable, and so if a browser supports UTF-8 it should recognise it automatically, and non try to interpret something else as UTF-8.

See also [edit]

• Code signal
• Replacement character
• Substitute character
• Newline – The conventions for representing the line break differ between Windows and Unix systems. Though most software supports both conventions (which is fiddling), software that must preserve or display the divergence (e.m. version control systems and data comparison tools) can go substantially more difficult to utilise if non adhering to ane convention.
• Byte order mark – The almost in-band mode to shop the encoding together with the data – prepend information technology. This is by intention invisible to humans using compliant software, but will by design exist perceived as "garbage characters" to incompliant software (including many interpreters).
• HTML entities – An encoding of special characters in HTML, by and large optional, simply required for sure characters to escape interpretation as markup.

  While failure to use this transformation is a vulnerability (see cross-site scripting), applying information technology besides 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} Rex, Ritchie (2012). "Volition unicode soon exist the universal code? [The Data]". IEEE Spectrum. 49 (7): lx. 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 e-mail 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 one-59921-039-8.
7. ^ "Usage of Windows-1251 for websites".
8. ^ "Declaring character encodings in HTML".
9. ^ "PRC GBK (XGB)". Microsoft. Archived from the original on 2002-ten-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://marathi.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'southward digital world". The Japan Times. 27 September 2019. Retrieved 24 Dec 2019. Oct. 1 is "U-Day", when Myanmar officially volition adopt the new arrangement.... Microsoft and Apple helped other countries standardize years agone, but Western sanctions meant Myanmar lost out.
14. ^ ^{a b} Hotchkiss, Griffin (March 23, 2016). "Boxing of the fonts". Borderland Myanmar . Retrieved 24 December 2019. With the release of Windows XP service pack 2, complex scripts were supported, which made it possible for Windows to render a Unicode-compliant Burmese font such as Myanmar1 (released in 2005). ... Myazedi, BIT, and later Zawgyi, circumscribed the rendering problem past calculation extra code points that were reserved for Myanmar'due south indigenous languages. Non only does the re-mapping prevent time to come indigenous language back up, it also results in a typing organisation that can be disruptive and inefficient, even for experienced users. ... Huawei and Samsung, the two 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 organisation as Myanmar prepares to migrate from Zawgyi to Unicode". Rising Voices . Retrieved 24 December 2019. Standard Myanmar Unicode fonts were never mainstreamed unlike the private and partially Unicode compliant Zawgyi font. ... Unicode will amend natural language processing
16. ^ "Why Unicode is Needed". Google Code: Zawgyi Project . Retrieved 31 Oct 2013.
17. ^ "Myanmar Scripts and Languages". Ofttimes Asked Questions. Unicode Consortium. Retrieved 24 December 2019. "UTF-8" technically does not apply to advertizing 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". Facebook Engineering. Facebook. Retrieved 25 Dec 2019. Information technology makes communication on digital platforms difficult, as content written in Unicode appears garbled to Zawgyi users and vice versa. ... In order to improve attain their audiences, content producers in Myanmar often post in both Zawgyi and Unicode in a single post, not to mention English or other languages.
19. ^ Saw Yi Nanda (21 Nov 2019). "Myanmar switch to Unicode to take two years: app developer". The Myanmar Times . Retrieved 24 December 2019.

External links [edit]

longgreasse.blogspot.com

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

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