CSV Encoding Fixer
Turn garbled Shopify exports — é, ’, mystery symbols — back into clean, readable text.
Drop a CSV file here or click to browse
Your data never leaves your browser
or paste the broken text
Tired of re-fixing the same broken exports?
ShopSheets syncs your Shopify data straight to Google Sheets as clean UTF-8 — no more mangled characters from Excel.
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The CSV encoding fixer repairs the garbled characters that appear when a Shopify export is opened in Excel with the wrong character set. It reverses mojibake — sequences like é or ’ that were once é or a curly apostrophe — and can flatten smart quotes and dashes to plain ASCII.
Shopify writes CSVs as UTF-8, but Excel on Windows frequently reads them as Windows-1252, corrupting every accented letter and typographic mark. This tool detects the real encoding, restores the original text, and can add a UTF-8 byte order mark so the file opens correctly the next time. Everything runs in your browser; the file is never uploaded.
How to use it
- Add your fileDrop in the CSV that shows garbled characters, or paste the broken text directly.
- Let it repair the encodingThe tool detects the original encoding, reverses mojibake like é and ’, and can flatten smart quotes to plain ASCII.
- Download the clean CSVCopy the fixed text or download a UTF-8 file with a BOM so Excel opens it correctly next time.
Frequently asked questions
- Why does my Shopify CSV show é or ’ in Excel?
- Those are mojibake. Shopify exports UTF-8, but Excel on Windows often opens the file as Windows-1252, so multi-byte characters like é or a curly apostrophe get misread as two or three garbage characters. This tool reverses that misreading to recover the original text.
- What is a BOM and should I add one?
- A byte order mark is an invisible marker at the start of a file that tells Excel the file is UTF-8. Adding it is the reliable way to make Excel open the CSV with the right characters. It is safe for Shopify import too. Leave it off only if a downstream system complains about an unexpected character at the start.
- Does the tool change my data?
- It only repairs character encoding: it reverses mojibake and, if you ask, converts smart quotes, dashes, and non-breaking spaces to plain ASCII. It never adds, removes, or reorders rows or columns.
- Is my file uploaded anywhere?
- No. All decoding and repair happens in your browser using the built-in text decoder. Nothing is sent to a server.
- What encodings can it read?
- It reads UTF-8 (with or without a BOM) and falls back to Windows-1252 / Latin-1 for legacy files whose bytes are not valid UTF-8, which covers the vast majority of Shopify and Excel exports.