Garbled file name fixer — turn الصورة back into real text
A name like "الصورة" is not a damaged file. The file itself may be perfectly fine — what went wrong is that its name was read with the wrong character encoding. The bytes were copied correctly; they were just interpreted as the wrong alphabet.
That is why this is usually repairable. Reading UTF-8 bytes as Windows-1256 or Latin-1 scrambles them into shapes like the one above, and running the same step backwards unscrambles them exactly. Nothing is guessed from context, and no dictionary is involved.
Paste one name per line. Each one is tried against the eight encodings that actually cause this in the region, and the readings are ranked by how much the result looks like real Arabic, Persian or Turkish rather than like noise.
When a name cannot be recovered, this page says so instead of offering a pretty guess. Knowing that a name is gone for good is more useful than being handed a wrong one.
One name per line. Paste ten or a thousand — everything happens on your device.
What actually happened to the name
Every case below is the same accident: UTF-8 bytes read through a single-byte encoding. The shape of the mess tells you which one.
| Read as | What it looks like | Where it usually comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Windows-1256 (Arabic) | ط§ظ„طµظˆط±ط© — still Arabic letters, but they read as nonsense | An Arabic Windows system reading UTF-8 bytes |
| Windows-1252 / Latin-1 (Western) | الصورة — accented Latin letters and stray symbols | ZIP archives, FTP transfers, copying between systems |
| Windows-1254 (Turkish) | Işık instead of Işık | Turkish Windows, older archives |
| Mac Arabic | ظ'عÑ — Arabic letters mixed with ASCII punctuation | Archives created on old Macs |
| DOS Arabic (cp864) | ﻅ§ﻋ▒ — box-drawing and filler characters | Very old DOS-era archives |
| Applied twice | ال — the mess has a mess inside it | A name that was already wrong, and then got converted again |
When a name is gone for good
Two situations are genuinely unrecoverable, and this page reports them rather than guessing. First, if the name contains replacement characters (the diamond with a question mark, or stray question marks where letters should be), the original bytes were discarded earlier by something that decoded the name with loss — there is nothing left to read. Second, some old Mac encodings map high bytes onto ordinary ASCII punctuation, so a quote mark in the mess could have been either a quote mark or an Arabic letter, and there is no way to tell which. Both are properties of how the name was damaged, not limits of this page.
Nothing leaves your device
The names you paste are processed by JavaScript in this tab and nowhere else. There is no upload endpoint on this site and no code here that could send a name anywhere. Your file names often contain personal information, which is exactly why this runs offline: the page keeps working after you disconnect the internet.
The name is fixed. What about the file itself?
A readable name tells you which file you are looking at — it does not bring the data back. If you already ran a recovery and the files refuse to open, check them here first: it takes seconds and tells you whether there is anything left to save.
Common questions
Why do recovered files come back with names like الصورة?
Because the name was stored as UTF-8 bytes and something later read those bytes as a single-byte encoding, usually Windows-1256 or Latin-1. The bytes survived intact; only the reading of them was wrong, which is why reversing the step restores the name exactly.
Does my file name get uploaded?
No. Everything happens in this tab. There is no server waiting for your names — you can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and it still works.
Can every garbled name be fixed?
No, and this page will tell you when it cannot. Names that already contain replacement characters lost their bytes before you got them. Names damaged by old Mac encodings that mix Arabic letters with ASCII punctuation are ambiguous by nature.
My name has ▯ or ? where letters should be. Can you still fix it?
No. That marker means the original byte was already thrown away by whatever produced the name. Every repair works by re-reading bytes that still exist; once they are replaced, no tool can recover them.
Which languages do you handle?
Arabic and Persian primarily, plus Turkish and Western European languages. The eight encodings tried here are the ones that actually produce this problem in practice, not an exhaustive list of every code page that has ever existed.
Can I fix hundreds of names at once?
Yes. Paste one per line — a few hundred at a time is comfortable. Processing is instant because nothing is sent anywhere; the limit is only how long you want the list on screen.
Do you rename the files for me?
No, and be careful with tools that claim to. A browser cannot touch files you have not explicitly handed to it, and renaming recovered files in place can destroy the evidence you still need. Copy the repaired name, rename the copy, keep the original untouched.
Why did my ZIP extract with wrong names?
Older ZIP tools record names as raw bytes with no encoding declared, so the extracting program guesses — and on a system set to a different language it guesses wrong. Extracting again with a tool that lets you set the encoding usually avoids the problem entirely.
Where to go next
A repaired name tells you what the file is. These pages cover getting the files themselves back, and what not to do to the device while you still can.
Last updated: 2026-10-01