What ñ means
ñ is a broken ñ (ñ): your text was saved as UTF-8 but read as Windows-1252. It's ñ, the n with a tilde, a letter of the Spanish alphabet in words like año, señor and España. In UTF-8 it's C3 B1, and Windows-1252 shows those bytes as à and ±.
Byte by byte
| Byte | In UTF-8 | Windows-1252 shows |
|---|---|---|
| C3 | lead byte: 2 bytes in all | Ã |
| B1 | continuation byte | ± |
Byte by bytestringmash.com/mojibake/broken-n-tilde
Where you probably saw it
Spanish text and names: Peña, Muñoz, Núñez.
Address lists and mailing labels, where a surname or a street name comes out wrong.
Spreadsheets of Spanish-language data opened in Excel.
Related sequences
Text broken this way rarely has just one problem. á is a broken á, é is a broken é, ü is a broken ü. The mojibake fixer repairs all of them at once, and its table lists the rest.
Questions
What does ñ mean?
It's a broken ñ: the UTF-8 bytes C3 B1 read as Windows-1252, which shows B1 as ±.
Why does it matter so much in Spanish?
Some words change meaning without the tilde, so a garbled ñ is worth fixing rather than dropping.
Can I fix a whole list of names at once?
Yes. Paste the whole list above.
Sources
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