Fixing UTF-8 Encoding Errors in PO Files (BOM, Charset & More)
Garbled accents, mojibake, and msgfmt charset errors in PO files come down to three things: a wrong Content-Type charset header, a stray UTF-8 BOM, or a file that was never UTF-8. This guide shows how to diagnose the real encoding with file -i and xxd, fix the charset header, strip the BOM, convert cleanly with msgconv and iconv, repair double-encoded mojibake, and add a CI check so it never comes back.