CSV Encoding Detector — Detect Character Encoding Online

Detect the character encoding of any CSV file — UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252, and more.

Drag & drop your CSV here

or click to browse — max 500 MB

Frequently Asked Questions

The tool detects: UTF-8, UTF-8 with BOM, UTF-16 LE, UTF-16 BE, ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1), Windows-1252, ASCII, and several other common encodings using BOM byte analysis and PHP mbstring heuristics.

CSV files are plain text. If you open a file with the wrong encoding, non-ASCII characters like accented letters (é, ü, ñ), currency symbols (€, £), and CJK characters appear as garbled text called mojibake. Knowing the encoding lets you open the file correctly in Excel, Google Sheets, or any application.

In Excel, go to Data → From Text/CSV, select your file, then choose the correct encoding in the import wizard. Alternatively, use the CSV Repair Tool to convert the file to UTF-8 first, which works in all modern applications without any special steps.

A BOM (Byte Order Mark) is a special 3-byte sequence (0xEF 0xBB 0xBF) at the start of UTF-8 files. It is harmless in Excel but can cause issues in databases, APIs, and some text editors by appearing as a stray character. Use the CSV Repair Tool to remove it if needed.

Yes. The file is read once to detect its encoding, then discarded immediately. No content is stored permanently.

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Files uploaded for server processing are stored in a secure temporary location, processed immediately, and deleted automatically. We do not read, store, or share your data.