When previewing a plain text (.txt) file in iCloud Drive on the web (icloud.com/drive), accented characters (e.g., Hungarian á, é, í, ó, ö, ő, ú, ü, ű) are displayed as garbled/incorrect characters (mojibake), even though the file is correctly encoded in UTF-8.
Steps to reproduce:
Create a plain text file with accented characters, saved explicitly as UTF-8 (no BOM) — tested using a Linux text editor (Debian, default GUI text editor)
Upload the file to iCloud Drive
Open/preview the file in the iCloud Drive web interface
Result: Accented characters appear as garbled/incorrect symbols in the web preview.
Confirms this is a preview-only rendering issue, not a file corruption issue:
Downloading the exact same file back from iCloud Drive and opening it locally shows the accented characters correctly — the file itself is untouched and correctly encoded
Re-saving and re-uploading the file (still valid UTF-8, no BOM) does not resolve the display issue in the web preview
This suggests the iCloud Drive web preview is misinterpreting the encoding (likely reading UTF-8 bytes as Latin-1/Windows-1252) rather than detecting UTF-8 correctly
Environment:
Browser: Mozilla Firefox, Chromium based ANY
File created on: Debian Linux (default text editor)
Encoding confirmed: UTF-8, no BOM
Question:
Is this a known issue with iCloud Drive's web-based text file preview/encoding detection? Is there a way to force UTF-8 interpretation for preview, or should this be filed as a bug via Feedback Assistant instead?
Topic:
App & System Services
SubTopic:
iCloud
0
0
176