Garbled characters and “everything in one column” are different failures
Unreadable characters point toward encoding. Readable text that stays in one column points toward the delimiter. Treating them as the same problem makes troubleshooting harder.
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Identify encoding and delimiter problems that cause garbled text or broken columns.
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When CSV opens as mojibake, a single column, or strangely shifted columns, separate two questions first: how the bytes are decoded, and where the columns are split. This tool checks an encoding candidate plus comma/TAB/semicolon/pipe delimiter consistency in one place.
Unreadable characters point toward encoding. Readable text that stays in one column points toward the delimiter. Treating them as the same problem makes troubleshooting harder.
The comma in "Tokyo, Japan" is data, not a column boundary. The inspector parses quoted fields before judging row widths, so quoted commas are less likely to create a false comma match.
A candidate showing three columns at 90% consistency means most sampled rows parse to three fields, but some do not. Those outliers may contain broken quotes or unexpected separators.
ASCII bytes are compatible with multiple encodings, so a file containing only simple Latin letters/numbers can be impossible to distinguish from content alone. Treat auto-detection as evidence, not a contract.
If an export opens entirely in column A, check whether TAB or semicolon produces a consistent multi-column shape. If the Japanese text is also garbled, investigate encoding separately.