Jesse Mullan

Mojibake

Written on Monday, the 23^rd of August, 2004 at 3:59 am and was filed under: Nerdity, Speaking in Tongues

What happens when you try to display text encoded in one character set in another character set? Garbage characters. I'm working on a migration module for gallery - to upgrade from one type of data storage to a completely different one. Along the way I keep learning about character sets and character set conversion. Here's a lovely set of words for something that I would rather not see - garbled, junky international text.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: (paraphrased)

Mojibake

文字化け: [mojibake] moji: character + bake: change/ghost.

亂碼 or 乱码: [luan4 ma3] “chaotic code(s)”, in Chinese.

крокозябра [krokozyabry]: The Russian term for mangled characters.

One Response to “Mojibake ”

1. 
   matt said on November 4th, 2004 at 12:10 pm

   those all display properly on my SUSE desktop :)