EBW Database Encoding Scrubber for Joomla 5 & 6 scrubber-1

EBW Database Encoding Scrubber for Joomla 5 & 6

A Joomla 5+/6 admin component that detects and repairs encoding problems in your database — double-encoded UTF-8, Latin-1/CP1252 Mojibake, and other character corruption.

The Problem:

Databases migrated from older Joomla versions, imported from external sources, or running with mismatched charset configurations often contain corrupted text:

• Double-encoded UTF-8**: `Riesterförderung` instead of `Riesterförderung`
• Latin-1 Mojibake**: `ä` instead of `ä`, `ü` instead of `ü`
• CP1252 artifacts**: `“` instead of `"`, `â€"` instead of `—`
• MySQL latin1 quirks**: `Ãœ` (Ã+œ) instead of `Ü`, `ß` (Ã+Ÿ) instead of `ß`

This component scans your entire database, identifies these problems, and repairs them safely.

Features:

• Scans all text columns (VARCHAR, TEXT, etc.) across any table
• Detects four encoding problem types:

  - Double-encoded UTF-8

  - Latin-1 misread as UTF-8 (Mojibake)

  - Windows-1252 misread as UTF-8

  - Invalid UTF-8 byte sequences

• Handles MySQL's `latin1 = CP1252` mapping (bytes 0x80-0x9F)
• Regex-based repair that fixes intact patterns without destroying already-broken bytes

       **Dry-run preview** before any changes are made

• Transaction-based repairs (atomic rollback on error)
• Configurable row limit per table
• Works with Joomla and non-Joomla tables

    - No external dependencies — pure PHP with mbstring

Requirements:

• Joomla 5.0+ or 6.0+
• PHP 8.1+ with mbstring extension
• MySQL or MariaDB