MultiKit

Corrupted Text Generator: Make Text Look Damaged or Garbled

  • Free
  • No sign-up
  • Runs in your browser
  • Version 1.0.2
  • Last updated 2026-11-09
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Make text look as if a file got damaged: letters replaced by blocks and symbols, some letters repeated or missing, and accented or non-English letters turned into the strange characters an app shows when it reads them with the wrong encoding.

Remove the effect takes off the marks that Zalgo, glitch and overlapping text add, and real accents with them (é becomes e).
Marks go:

Text like this can be hard or impossible to read with a screen reader, can overflow the line, and some sites remove it. Do not use it for names or passwords.

Everything you enter is processed in your browser and is never sent to a server.

Browsers:Chrome87+Edge87+Firefox125+Safari14.1+Opera73+Samsung Internet14.0+Browsers

How to use

  1. Type or paste your text. Add some accented letters, such as café, or non-English text, to see the encoding effect.
  2. Corrupted is already chosen. Move the intensity slider to decide how many letters are damaged.
  3. Leave the encoding box ticked to turn accented and non-English letters into their garbled form, or untick it to leave them.
  4. Press Re-roll for different damage, then Copy result.

Examples

café, intensity 0
→ café
é is two bytes in UTF-8; read as windows-1252 they show as é.
Hello café, intensity 50
→ HÃ×lo café
One letter was replaced by a symbol, and the é was garbled.
안녕, intensity 0
→ 안녕
Korean letters become the characters a wrong encoding makes of them.

How it works

This page is the Text Destroyer with the Corrupted effect chosen. The encoding effect is real: each letter outside plain English is turned into its UTF-8 bytes, which are then read as windows-1252 by the decoder of your browser, the same table browsers use for that encoding. The damage that the intensity slider controls is made at random from a seed: a letter is replaced by a block or symbol, repeated three times, or dropped. The text is split into the characters a reader sees (a letter and the marks on it are one), the effect is applied to the letters and digits only, and spaces, punctuation and emoji are left as they are. The random choices follow a seed: the same seed gives the same result, and Re-roll picks a new one.

Text like this is made of ordinary Unicode characters, so it can be pasted almost anywhere, but it is hard for screen readers to read, can spill over the lines around it, and some sites and apps remove or limit it. Do not use it for names, passwords or anything someone must be able to read.

This page is the Text Destroyer with the Corrupted effect chosen. It makes two kinds of damage, one real and one random.

The real part: wrong-encoding garbling

Each character outside plain English is turned into its UTF-8 bytes, and the bytes are read as windows-1252, one character per byte, by the decoder of your browser. é is the two bytes C3 and A9 and shows as é. The Korean 안녕 is six bytes and comes out as six characters, 안녕. This is the garbling a program makes when it opens a UTF-8 file with the wrong encoding, so the garbled text fixer can reverse it if the text was garbled only once. It applies to every character beyond ASCII, an emoji included: 😀 becomes 😀. It also applies at intensity 0, as long as the encoding box is ticked.

The random part

Intensity decides how many of the remaining characters are damaged. Each character that is not a space has a chance of half the intensity, so at most one in two at 100. A damaged character is dropped (10 percent of them), repeated three times (25 percent), or replaced by one of 18 block and symbol characters (65 percent). Measured on a long sample at intensity 100, about three letters in ten became a symbol, and the text grew by about 17 percent, because repeated letters outnumber dropped ones. At intensity 0 plain English is not changed at all. The same seed gives the same damage.

What cannot be undone

The encoding part can be repaired, because the bytes are all still there. Dropped letters and letters replaced by a symbol cannot, since nothing of the original is kept in the result. If you need the original, keep it.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

Is the garbling real?
Yes, for the encoding effect. The letters are turned into bytes the way real text is saved (UTF-8) and read as windows-1252, which is what a program does when it opens a file with the wrong encoding. The result is the same garbling you see in a real damaged text.
Can the garbled text be repaired?
The encoding garbling can be repaired by the garbled text fixer, if the text was only garbled once. The random blocks and symbols cannot be repaired, since nothing of the letter they replaced is kept.
Why does plain English not change by encoding?
Plain English letters are one byte in UTF-8 and read the same in windows-1252, so a wrong encoding does not change them. The intensity slider adds the other damage.
What is it good for?
A caption or post that should look damaged, a joke about a broken file, or a demonstration of what a wrong encoding does to accents. It is no way to hide text, because the encoding part can be reversed.
Is my text uploaded?
No. The damage is made in this tab and the text is not sent.

Guides

Version history
  • 1.0.2 — Replaces the shared explanation with one of its own: how the wrong-encoding garbling is made (emoji included), what the random damage does at each intensity, and what cannot be undone.
  • 1.0.1 — Clarifies the search title with the tool's main task and whether it is free or runs online.
  • 1.0.0 — First release.

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