Why Your Spreadsheet Mangles José's Name

My Weird Prompts · Sep 23, 2026 · 25m

Ever opened a UTF-8 CSV in Excel and watched José turn into "José"? That garbled text is called mojibake, and it's the visible symptom of a character set mismatch hiding beneath every keyboard layout, font, and file format you touch. This episode unpacks the three layers people constantly collapse into one — code points, encodings, and graphemes — and shows why the encoding layer being wrong poisons everything above it. From ASCII's 1963 origins and UTF-8's genius backward compatibility, to the byte-length trap, the NFC/NFD normalization split that once made files vanish on macOS, and…