Hi All,

Occasionally I come across text file or web pages that are supposedly Japanese content but the encoding is some format my browser or text application cannot parse and I get text that looks like gibberish. Is this a common and easy to resolve issue? I imagine there's a font or some setting I need to change, something simple, but I'm not sure. Below is an example. Thanks for any suggestions!

"ƒvƒŠƒxƒbƒg’Ê‚è‚S”Ô’n A’© H‚Ì È‚Å ¡’©‚à‚Ü‚½‚¢‚´‚±‚´‚ªŽn‚Ü‚Á‚½ Bƒo [ƒmƒ“

k.

It's Shift_JIS. Try manually changing it. In Firefox that's View-->Character Encoding.

Yeah, it's an encoding problem. In Japanese this is called 文字化け in case you were curious.

i swear to god no one on the internet knows how to properly declare a content type

nest0r Wrote:It's Shift_JIS. Try manually changing it. In Firefox that's View-->Character Encoding.

How do I change the encoding if it's a local text file? I guess I could open the text file in firefox and then change the encoding? Thanks for the suggestions.

EDIT: Nevermind. Opened file in firefox, set to Japanese auto-detect encoding and it set things up nicely. Then saved as a non-mumbo-jumbo format. Thanks everyone!

k

You should use a good text editor, one which allows you to switch encodings. On the Mac I use BBEdit. On Windows I think BabelPad is supposed to be good for switching between scripts.

Actually I just had to convert a bunch of files myself and I remember this great little program called Encoding Master. A free tool for Mac and PC which can convert files from any encoding to any other encoding, individually or bulk conversion of whole folders. Very useful for getting from Shift-JIS to UTF8!