Liangxu Linux

May 13, 2021 · Fundamentals

Why Does Text Become Garbled? A Deep Dive into UTF‑8, GBK, and Unicode

This article explains why characters appear as garbled text when encoding and decoding methods mismatch, explores how Excel defaults to GBK, shows how to convert files with iconv, and walks through the evolution from ASCII to GB2312, GBK, GB18030, and finally Unicode's UTF‑8 encoding.