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ü is a broken ü

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

33 characters
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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. ü → ü (U+00FC): bytes C3 BC
  3. ß → ß (U+00DF): bytes C3 9F
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What ü means

ü is a broken ü (ü): your text was saved as UTF-8 but read as Windows-1252. It's ü, the u with an umlaut, used in German, Turkish and Hungarian. Its UTF-8 bytes are C3 BC, which Windows-1252 shows as à and ¼, a fraction that really doesn't belong in München.

WHY IT HAPPENS

Byte by byte

ü (U+00FC) in UTF-8, and what Windows-1252 makes of each byte
ByteIn UTF-8Windows-1252 shows
C3lead byte: 2 bytes in allÃ
BCcontinuation byte¼

Byte by bytestringmash.com/mojibake/broken-u-umlaut

Where you probably saw it

German place names and words: München, Zürich, Grüße.

Turkish text, where ü is a separate letter of the alphabet.

Data exchanged between systems in different countries, each with its own default character set.

Related sequences

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

Questions

What does ü mean?

It's a broken ü. The UTF-8 bytes C3 BC were read as Windows-1252, which shows BC as ¼.

What about ß?

That's a broken ß, the German sharp s. The fixer repairs it too.

And ö and ä?

Broken ö and ä. Every accented letter follows the same pattern.

Sources

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