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Turkish Character Fixer

Fix garbled Turkish characters like ç or ü, or strip text of Turkish diacritics into plain ASCII.

Fix garbled Turkish characters like ç or ü, or strip text of Turkish diacritics (ç/ğ/ı/ö/ş/ü) into plain ASCII.

Turkish Character Fixer completes this text task in seconds, without the manual back-and-forth. With Turkish Character Fixer, this kind of text edit becomes as simple as copy and paste. Everything runs in your browser — your file or text is never uploaded to a server.

Step-by-step

  1. Paste the text you want to repair or simplify into the 'Text' box.
  2. Choose an 'Action'. 'fix' turns garbled sequences such as ç or ü back into proper Turkish letters. 'strip' replaces ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş and ü with plain c, g, i, o, s and u.
  3. Click 'Run'.
  4. Before copying the result, check a few lines by eye, paying special attention to the dotted capital İ and the dotless ı, which are the letters most likely to go wrong.

When is it useful?

Garbled Turkish usually means a UTF-8 file was opened as if it used an older Western European encoding. You'll see it when a CSV export is opened straight in Excel or after a database migration. Strings like ş and ı are the giveaway, and 'fix' is meant for exactly that. 'strip' is for the opposite need: places that won't accept Turkish letters at all, such as file names, URL slugs, name fields on some international forms.

Example

An exported customer list shows city names like Ä°stanbul and MuÄŸla. Run that column through 'fix' and you get İstanbul and Muğla back. If you then need image file names from the same product list, 'strip' turns a title like Çiğ Köfte Seti into Cig Kofte Seti.

Two actions: fix and strip

“Fix” mode reverses the garbled characters that appear when UTF-8 Turkish text is opened with the wrong encoding. The tool recognises these 12 garbled sequences: ç → ç, Ç → Ç, ÄŸ → ğ, Äž → Ğ, ı → ı, Ä° → İ, ö → ö, Ö → Ö, ÅŸ → ş, Åž → Ş, ü → ü, Ãœ → Ü. Example: “Çocuklar ÅŸehir üç gün sonra” becomes “Çocuklar şehir üç gün sonra”. “Strip” mode does the opposite and turns the 12 Turkish letters into their ASCII equivalents: ç→c, ğ→g, ı→i, ö→o, ş→s, ü→u and the capitals; İ→I, “Çalışma Işığı” → “Calisma Isigi”.

When using it

  • Fixing only finds the 12 sequences above. Damage from other encoding mistakes (for example characters in text opened as ISO-8859-9) is not repaired.
  • Fixing is reliable when the text was saved before it was damaged; if letters have been permanently replaced by “?” or “�”, the information is lost and cannot be restored.
  • Stripping cannot be undone: “ı” and “i” turn into the same letter, so the original spelling cannot be recovered automatically. Keep the original text.
  • Use strip when you need ASCII for a file name, an email subject or an old system, and fix mode to repair text that looks garbled.

Things to keep in mind

  • Text can be corrupted in more than one way. Characters such as Ý, þ or ð come from a different mix-up and may not be fully repaired.
  • The lasting fix is to open the source file with the right encoding. In Excel, importing the CSV and choosing UTF-8 stops the problem from coming back.
  • Stripping can't be undone and can change meaning, since some Turkish words differ only by these letters. Use it carefully on text people will read.
  • Before removing Turkish letters from a person's name on an official form, check whether the form actually rejects them.