How do I change the character encoding for a webpage in Chrome?

126

Google Chrome, like almost every web browser in recent memory, used to have an option to change the character encoding for the webpage being viewed by going to Menu › Tools › Encoding (or some similar location). This is extraordinarily useful in case the website misrepresents its encoding in its headers, or, failing to do so, Chrome mistakenly detects the encoding of the page.

However, it seems as though in recent versions of Chrome, this option to manually override the character encoding is… missing. Either missing, or moved somewhere very obscure, because I cannot find it anywhere.

I'm currently looking at a mojibake-filled webpage in what I presume should be Russian, which is entirely unreadable and unusable because Chrome is mistakenly rendering it with the wrong character encoding.

How can I change the character encoding for a webpage in Google Chrome?

Edit: For reference, I'm on Version 55.0.2883.87 m, and the encoding option is flat-out missing from the Tools menu:

Meshaal

Posted 2016-12-25T06:04:30.777

Reputation: 1 362

Answers

117

Unfortunately… a Christmas-box from Google Chrome: Chrome encoding options gone?:

…

Chrome 55 has removed the Encoding menu and Chrome will do auto-encoding detection now:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=597488 - Remove encoding menu

Manual encoding selection is not necessary any more as the new encoding detector is turned on by default.

Manual encoding switching may be able to be done by use of Chrome extensions.

Marked as best answer by Kameron M - Community Manager

JosefZ

Posted 2016-12-25T06:04:30.777

Reputation: 9 121

90sigh~ Thanks for the information; rather a pity the new encoding detector is hot garbage. – Meshaal – 2016-12-27T01:47:58.333

Hum… I miss that option as well; I use this feature via IE Tab extension currently lacking better solution:(

– JosefZ – 2016-12-27T08:12:45.277

13This is a really sad turn of events. It seems that Chrome cannot correctly detect Shift-JIS encoding properly in all cases, which is becoming a hassle for me while doing research on Japanese webpages that haven't been updated in many years... At least Firefox lets me manually select Shift-JIS. – recognizer – 2017-02-09T21:29:53.993

7Unfortunately... many websites still mangle their own encodings. – Nick T – 2017-06-13T20:43:13.737

6Chrome can't even detect codepage on the saved G+ page. This is retarded. Google's community managers are retarded too if they mark such answers as accepted and freeze threads so I can't even tell them there that they broke Chrome. – Nakilon – 2018-02-13T06:44:44.020

4What is even more awful, to be able to use these extensions on the saved pages you have to allow them "access to file:// urls" – Nakilon – 2018-02-13T06:58:10.893

5Just adding my comment here screaming that whoever decided to remove this probably don't read anything other then ASCII, coming here after opening a txt file that isn't detected correctly, not to mention all pages that needs different encodings. – NiKiZe – 2018-06-10T16:42:21.837

2It seems Chrome is drifting towards what has been the IE behavior for year, making life of developers and users more and more miserable! – Marco Demaio – 2018-12-18T17:06:08.700

You can now use extensions. Here is an example https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/set-character-encoding/bpojelgakakmcfmjfilgdlmhefphglae

user2686101

Posted 2016-12-25T06:04:30.777

Reputation: 351

28...and this is how you get malware – lmojzis – 2017-02-17T05:36:05.553

9@lmojzis Is this particular extension known to be malware? Or are you giving general advice? – nitro2k01 – 2017-03-29T06:10:21.683

11giving general advice – lmojzis – 2017-03-30T05:03:07.847

14Kind of a naff place to put "general advice" for a specific question. – Worthy7 – 2017-08-08T06:23:40.073

7@lmojzis to better relate you comment to this question one could say: ...because Google chooses to mitigate a "security risk" by opening a malware hole. (this extension may not be malware, but when Google announces that users should look for extensions to replace core functionality, I would be surprised if no malware emerges among the candidates. If someone wanted to get malware out, they would certainly grab this oportunity) ;P – Superole – 2018-01-09T16:19:18.127

I tried to add a user-defined encoding (ISO-8859-1) in the settings of that addon without any luck. The "save" button does nothing. – Anders Lindén – 2018-06-16T14:54:45.973

@AndersLindén Try to close the option page then recheck the result – user2686101 – 2018-06-16T15:22:15.107

2@lmojzis that's a pointless advice. A browser without extensions is outright unusable – GrayFace – 2018-07-25T01:49:41.530

I have tried this extension, but unfortunatelly, it require to refresh the page. And it is not able to resend the POST data :-( – Ondrej – 2018-11-21T17:14:32.010

-6

There should be a button in the upper-right corner called "Menu" (three horizontal lines). Then try Menu → More tools → Encoding or Menu → Tools → Encoding(E)

Zagavarr

Posted 2016-12-25T06:04:30.777

Reputation: 7

That's exactly where I expected it. Unfortunately…

– Meshaal – 2016-12-25T10:30:28.670