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Fix Mojibake and UnicodeDecodeError: UTF-8, Encodings and Normalization

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Self-Hosting & Infra beginner 6 min read $0.01 Updated 2026-10-19

Diagnosing text encoding problems: recognizing mojibake patterns, UTF-8 vs Latin-1 and Windows-1252, decoding at input and encoding at output, Python and Node handling, BOM, HTTP charset and HTML meta, databases (utf8mb4), CSV from Excel, and Unicode normalization.

Text shows as ’ or question marks, or Python raises UnicodeDecodeError. Identify the real encoding, decode and encode at the edges, set UTF-8 in files, databases and HTTP, and normalize composed characters.

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