Google-chrome – How to change the character encoding for a webpage in Chrome

browsercharacter encodingencodinggoogle-chrome

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:

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Best Answer

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

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