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á is a broken á

Your text was saved as UTF-8 and read as Windows-1252. Paste it below and it's put right.

46 characters
Updates as you type
Correct text is left as it is

Show the steps
  1. Each garbled run was turned back into the bytes Windows-1252 showed, then read as UTF-8, as it should have been.
  2. ó → ó (U+00F3): bytes C3 B3
  3. á → á (U+00E1): bytes C3 A1
Printable chart

What á means

á is a broken á (á): your text was saved as UTF-8 but read as Windows-1252. It's á, the a with an acute accent, common in Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian and Czech. In UTF-8 it's C3 A1, which Windows-1252 shows as à and ¡, an upside-down exclamation mark, which can look deceptively Spanish.

WHY IT HAPPENS

Byte by byte

á (U+00E1) in UTF-8, and what Windows-1252 makes of each byte
ByteIn UTF-8Windows-1252 shows
C3lead byte: 2 bytes in allÃ
A1continuation byte¡

Byte by bytestringmash.com/mojibake/broken-a-acute

Where you probably saw it

Spanish and Portuguese text: está, página, informação.

Names such as Ángel or Mária in customer data.

Website content moved between hosts or content systems.

Related sequences

Text broken this way rarely has just one problem. é is a broken é, ñ is a broken ñ, ü is a broken ü. The mojibake fixer repairs all of them at once, and its table lists the rest.

Questions

What does á mean?

A broken á. The bytes C3 A1 were read as Windows-1252, which shows A1 as ¡.

My text also has ó and ú. Are those broken too?

Yes: ó is ó and ú is ú. The fixer repairs all of them together.

Is this a font problem?

No. The bytes are being read with the wrong encoding. A different font shows the same wrong characters.

Sources

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