EUC-KR to UTF-8 Converter (CP949, Shift_JIS)

What it is

This charset converter fixes files whose text turns into gibberish when they move between programs. Spreadsheets exported by Korean government sites or older Windows software are often saved as EUC-KR (CP949), and modern tools that expect UTF-8 show them as random symbols. Japanese files have the same problem with Shift_JIS. Open the file or paste the text, choose the target encoding and download the same content re-encoded.

How to use

1. Choose “Paste text” or “Open a file”.
2. For a file, keep the source encoding on “Detect automatically” and check the preview. If it looks broken, pick another source encoding.
3. Choose the target encoding. For UTF-8 or UTF-16 you can add a byte order mark; for CP949, EUC-KR or Shift_JIS you choose how to replace characters the target cannot hold.
4. Check the size and the first bytes in hex, then download. The file name gets a suffix such as -utf8 or -cp949.

How it works

• Encoding tables follow the WHATWG Encoding Standard, the same rules browsers use when they read euc-kr or shift_jis content.
• CP949 contains all 11,172 modern Hangul syllables: the 2,350 of KS X 1001 plus 8,822 more. With “EUC-KR (KS X 1001 only)” the extra syllables count as characters that cannot be encoded.
• Detection trusts a byte order mark first, then checks whether the bytes are valid UTF-8, and otherwise picks whichever of CP949, Shift_JIS and Windows-1252 reads most naturally.
• Files up to 20 MB can be opened.

Examples

Text	Target	Bytes
한글	CP949	C7 D1 B1 DB
한글	UTF-8	ED 95 9C EA B8 80
あ	Shift_JIS	82 A0
€	Windows-1252	80
가	UTF-8 with BOM	EF BB BF EA B0 80

A Korean syllable takes two bytes in CP949 and three in UTF-8, so the UTF-8 version of the same text is larger.