Data Cleaning Exercises

Glossary

Character encoding

How text is stored as bytes, such as UTF-8 or Windows-1252.

Reading a file with the wrong encoding turns é into é (mojibake). Declare the encoding when importing; UTF-8 is the safe default for new files, but legacy exports often use Windows-1252. Fix encoding at import, not by search-and-replace later.

Related: Unicode normalization (NFC), Delimiter and quoting