Convert a text file to Shift-JIS
Convert a text file to Shift-JIS (CP932 / Windows-31J). The source encoding is detected for you. For opening a CSV in Japanese Excel, or handing data to a legacy system that accepts nothing else. No installation, done in seconds.
When this helps
Anyone opening a CSV in Excel
A UTF-8 CSV opens as garbage in Excel even though the file is perfectly fine.
Convert it to Shift-JIS and Excel opens it correctly on a double-click.
Developers
A client's legacy system only accepts Shift-JIS uploads.
Convert the UTF-8 export to Shift-JIS before sending it on.
Back-office system owners
Import files for the core system have to arrive in a specified encoding.
Whatever encoding a file turns up in, normalise it to Shift-JIS before the import.
FAQ
- Will this fix a CSV that garbles in Excel?
- Yes. Japanese editions of Excel read a CSV without a byte order mark as Shift-JIS (CP932), so a valid UTF-8 file still opens as garbage. Convert it here and Excel opens it on a double-click, with no trip through the text import wizard.
- What happens to characters Shift-JIS doesn't have?
- They are replaced with the closest equivalent, and only what has no equivalent at all becomes "?". The é in café becomes e, an em dash becomes ―, € becomes EUR. Emoji, Hangul and simplified-only Chinese characters have nothing to map to and become "?". Both lists are shown with your result, so you always see exactly what changed.
- Do circled numbers (①②) and rare kanji (髙) survive?
- Yes. Shift-JIS as used here (CP932 / Windows-31J) includes the NEC and IBM extended characters, so ①②⑳, Ⅲ, 髙, 〜, ㈱, №, ℡, ㎡ and ㍻ all convert unchanged. The replacements are mostly accented Western European letters and a few typographic symbols.
- Do I have to know the source encoding?
- No — detection is the default, covering UTF-8, UTF-16, EUC-JP, ISO-2022-JP, and Chinese, Korean and Cyrillic encodings. The "Source encoding" list is there for the rare case where detection gets it wrong.
- Are line endings changed?
- No. CRLF stays CRLF and LF stays LF — this tool changes the character encoding and nothing else.
- Is my file saved to your server?
- No — if your browser supports WebAssembly (WASM, a technology that runs software safely and quickly right inside your browser), the file never leaves your device. If that isn't available, it falls back to normal server-side processing, which holds the file only while it is being converted and deletes it the moment it has been — nothing is kept either way.
- What's the file size limit?
- 10MB per file.
Related tools
- Convert to UTF-8 — To fix a garbled file into today's standard encoding instead
- Detect a file's encoding — When you only want to know what a file is, without converting it
- CSV to a Markdown table — When you want the contents as a table to paste somewhere