Character Encoding

The charset attribute specifies the character encoding for the HTML document and needs to be a valid character encoding (examples include windows-1252, ISO-8859-2, Shift_JIS, and UTF-8). UTF-8 (Unicode) is the most widely used and should be used for any new project.

<meta charset="UTF-8">

<meta charset="ISO-8859-1">

All browsers have always recognized the <meta charset> form, but if you for some reason need your page to be valid HTML 4.01, you can use the following instead:

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

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

See also the Encoding Standard, to view all available character encoding labels that browsers recognize.