Incorrect Encoding Declaration: Websites and documents often declare the character encoding they use in their headers or metadata. ftp.bills.com.au Fixing incorrectly ISO-8859-1 decoded UTF-8 string in Java
This specifically happens because UTF-8 uses multiple bytes for certain characters, but older systems interpret each byte as a separate character, resulting in the "alien" strings of symbols you see. Summary of the Encoding Issue
A mismatch between the source encoding and the destination reader. A common scenario is a web server or database sending UTF-8 data while the client expects Latin-1.