When I was checking the electricity production data in Taiwan from Taipower (台湾電力公司) website for this issue, I encountered a character encoding issue.

Here’s an example output from https://www.taipower.com.tw/d006/loadGraph/loadGraph/data/genary.txt.

{
    "": "2023-09-16 15:00",
    "aaData": [
        [
            "<A NAME='nuclear'></A><b>�瓲��(Nuclear)</b>",
            "",
            "�瓲銝�#1",
            "951.0",
            "943.8",
            "99.243%",
            " "
        ],
...

Yes, this is clearly Moji-bake. I’ve only had experience in Japanese encoding. So I couldn’t point out what is the original encoding from Moji-bake’d characters.

For Japanese, very old legacy sites, or ones made by outdated organizations, still sometimes uses non-UTF-8 encoding in this era! The common encodings are “Shift JIS” (or Windows modified version of it called CP932 and “EUC-JP”, that was used by old Japanese Linux environment. And Moji-bake has visual characteristics for each encoding, so if someone have certain exposure for them, they could say which encoding just looking at it.

There seems several common old encodings for Chinese characters in Taiwanese like Japanese. In this case, the answer was not “Big5” but “EUC-TW”. 🎉

{
    "": "2023-09-16 15:00",
    "aaData": [
        [
            "<A NAME='nuclear'></A><b>核能(Nuclear)</b>",
            "",
            "核三#1",
            "951.0",
            "943.8",
            "99.243%",
            " "
        ],
...

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