Setting a charset in programming, servers & other files

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Apache .htaccess file

You can use .htaccess to set a default character set for all your documents. Apache's default character set is ISO-8859-1. Apache will use this character set in the HTTP header it sends back to the browser after a request.

To set a default charset for your whole site, add the following code to your .htaccess file:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

To serve only your .html documents as UTF-8, add the following line: 

AddCharset UTF-8 .html

or:

AddType 'text/html; charset=UTF-8' html

AddCharset specifies just the charset, AddType specifies both MIME-type and charset in one line.

You can also limit this using Files, FilesMatch, Directory, and similar directives.

<FilesMatch "\.(htm|html|css|js)$">
ForceType 'text/html; charset=UTF-8'
</FilesMatch>
<Files "index.php">
ForceType 'text/html; charset=UTF-8'
</Files>

You can also create a new extension (index.utf8 is served as a Unicode UTF-8 document, while index.html is ISO-8859-1):

AddCharset UTF-8 .utf8

PHP

Use the header function to send an HTTP header:

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");

You must use this function before any output is sent to the browser. more ...


Python

In your source code set the character set:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

In Python 3 UTF-8 is the default character set.


HTML

Set a meta tag. There is a short version (introduced in HTML5) and a long version (also compatible with earlier HTML versions, such as XHTML):

<meta charset="utf-8">

or:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

You can use the short version unless you are targeting old browsers like IE6/IE7. Both versions will work in HTML5. The long version will overrule the short one and HTTP headers will overrule both.

Add the META tag in the <head>-section of your HTML document. Browsers might ignore this statement if your document has a BOM-header (see below).


XML

In the first line of the XML document:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>

Text-files: BOM-mark

The BOM header, or Byte Order Mark, is U+FEFF ("zero-width no-break space", EF BB BF in hex, 239 187 191 in decimal). It is a mark saved at the beginning of a text file to tell editors, browsers, and other programs that the text file is UTF-8 encoded (or UTF-16 or UTF-32). Many editors will automatically add a BOM header once you specify that the encoding is UTF-8. Some editors also have alternatives for the BOM-header, for example "UTF-8 Cookie", where the editor remembers that the document is UTF-8 by setting a cookie on your system.

BOM headers might cause problems with some scripting languages such as PHP (you might see some strange characters — the BOM header — flash for a fraction of a second before a page loads).


Looking to convert to/from UTF-8? View the conversion routines