CSV Encoding Fixer

A CSV saved from Excel on Windows is often Windows-1252 encoded, not UTF-8. Open that file assuming UTF-8 and every accented character (é, ñ, ü) turns into a garbled multi-character sequence, or gets replaced outright. Excel also sometimes uses a semicolon instead of a comma as the delimiter, depending on the system's regional settings.

This tool reads the file's raw bytes (not just its text), checks for a byte-order mark, and lets you pick the real source encoding when auto-detection can't be sure, so it can actually recover the original characters instead of guessing after the damage is done.

• Auto-detect only catches a byte-order mark (a few bytes some programs add at the start of a UTF-8 or UTF-16 file). Most Windows-1252 files have no BOM at all, so you'll usually need to pick it by hand.
• If you see a warning about characters that couldn't be decoded, try Windows-1252, by far the most common culprit for files exported from Excel.
• Add a UTF-8 byte-order mark on the way out if the file is going back into Excel, it's what makes Excel show accented characters correctly instead of misreading them again.