Mojibake
Garbled Characters
A phenomenon where text data isn't converted correctly and turns into unreadable strings of symbols.
In Simple Terms
Mojibake is when text stored on a computer turns into a completely different jumble of symbols or characters instead of the original, making it unreadable. For example, opening an old webpage might show a meaningless string of symbols and characters instead of the text that's supposed to be there. This happens when the rule a website used to encode its text doesn't match the rule the browser uses to decode it.
Behind the Name
The name comes from Japanese: "moji" (character) and "bakeru" (to transform, or turn into something else). It captures the idea of text "transforming" into gibberish. The term is sometimes used as-is — "Mojibake" — outside Japan, too.
Take a Closer Look!
Mojibake happens when the text data a computer is handling doesn't get translated correctly when it's displayed on screen, turning into a meaningless jumble of symbols and characters.
Computers process all information as combinations of 0s and 1s, so to display text, they rely on a conversion rule that says "this number combination equals this character." That conversion table linking numbers to characters is called a "character encoding."
Mojibake happens when the character encoding used to write the text data doesn't match the encoding used to read it back.
For example, if data written using the "UTF-8" encoding gets opened with an older encoding like "Shift_JIS," the mapping between numbers and characters gets thrown off, and completely different characters show up instead.
To put it simply, it's like trying to translate a sentence using the wrong language's dictionary — you'd end up with nonsense instead of the intended meaning.