In order to define charset for HTML5 Doctype, which notation should I use?
Short:
<meta charset="utf-8" />
Long:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
In HTML5, they are equivalent. Use the shorter one, as it is easier to remember and type. Browser support is fine since it was designed for backwards compatibility.
Both forms of the meta charset declaration are equivalent and should work the same across browsers. But, there are a few things you need to remember when declaring your web files character-set as UTF-8:
Save your file(s) in UTF-8 encoding without the byte-order mark (BOM).
Declare the encoding in your HTML files using meta charset (like above).
Your web server must serve your files, declaring the UTF-8 encoding in the Content-Type HTTP header.
Apache servers are configured to serve files in ISO-8859-1 by default, so you need to add the following line to your .htaccess file:
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
This will configure Apache to serve your files declaring UTF-8 encoding in the Content-Type response header, but your files must be saved in UTF-8 (without BOM) to begin with.
Notepad cannot save your files in UTF-8 without the BOM. A free editor that can is Notepad++. On the program menu bar, select "Encoding > Encode in UTF-8 without BOM". You can also open files and re-save them in UTF-8 using "Encoding > Convert to UTF-8 without BOM".
More on the Byte Order Mark (BOM) at Wikipedia.
Another reason to go with the short one is that it matches other instances where you might specify a character set in markup. For example:
<script type="javascript" charset="UTF-8" src="/script.js"></script>
<p><a charset="UTF-8" href="http://example.com/">Example Site</a></p>
Consistency helps to reduce errors and make code more readable.
Note that the charset attribute is case-insensitive. You can use UTF-8 or utf-8, however UTF-8 is clearer, more readable, more accurate.
Also, there is absolutely no reason at all to use any value other than UTF-8 in the meta charset attribute or page header. UTF-8 is the default encoding for Web documents since HTML4 in 1999 and the only practical way to make modern Web pages.
Also you should not use HTML entities in UTF-8. Characters like the copyright symbol should be typed directly. The only entities you should use are for the five reserved markup characters: less than, greater than, ampersand, prime, double prime.
Entities need an HTML parser, which you may not always want to use going forward. They introduce errors, make your code less readable, increase your file sizes, and sometimes decode incorrectly in various browsers depending on which entities you used. Learn how to type/insert copyright, trademark, open quote, close quote, apostrophe, em dash, en dash, bullet, Euro, and any other characters you encounter in your content, and use those actual characters in your code.
The Mac has a Character Viewer that you can turn on in the Keyboard System Preference, and you can find and then drag and drop the characters you need, or use the matching Keyboard Viewer to see which keys to type. For example, trademark is Option + 2. UTF-8 contains all of the characters and symbols from every written human language.
So there is no excuse for using -- instead of an em dash. It is not a bad idea to learn the rules of punctuation and typography also ... for example, knowing that a period goes inside a close quote, not outside.
Using a <meta> tag for something like content-type and encoding is highly
ironic, since without knowing those things, you couldn't parse the file
to get the value of the meta tag.
No, that is not true. The browser starts out parsing the file as the browser's default encoding, either UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1. Since US-ASCII is a subset of both ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8, the browser can read <html><head> just fine either way ... it is the same. When the browser encounters the meta charset tag, if the encoding is different than what the browser is already using, the browser reloads the page in the specified encoding.
That is why we put the meta charset tag at the top, right after the head tag, before anything else, even the title. That way you can use UTF-8 characters in your title.
You must save your file(s) in UTF-8 encoding without BOM
That is not strictly true. If you only have US-ASCII characters in your document, you can Save it as US-ASCII and serve it as UTF-8, because it is a subset. But if there are Unicode characters, you are correct, you must Save as UTF-8 without BOM.
If you want a good text editor that will save your files
in UTF-8, I recommend Notepad++.
On the Mac, use Bare Bones TextWrangler (free) from Mac App Store, or Bare Bones BBEdit which is at Mac App Store for $39.99 ... very cheap for such a great tool.
In either app, there is a menu at the bottom of the document window where you specify the document encoding and you can easily choose "UTF-8 no BOM". And of course you can set that as the default for new documents in Preferences.
But if your Webserver serves the encoding in the HTTP header,
which is recommended, both [meta tags] are needless.
That is incorrect. You should of course set the encoding in the HTTP header, but you should also set it in the meta charset attribute so that the page can be saved by the user, out of the browser onto local storage and then opened again later, in which case the only indication of the encoding that will be present is the meta charset attribute.
You should also set a base tag for the same reason ... on the server, the base tag is unnecessary, but when opened from local storage, the base tag enables the page to work as if it is on the server, with all the assets in place and so on, no broken links.
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
Or you can just change the encoding of particular file types like so:
AddType text/html;charset=utf-8 html
A tip for serving both UTF-8 and Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) files is to give the UTF-8 files a "text" extension and Latin-1 files "txt."
AddType text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 txt
AddType text/plain;charset=utf-8 text
Finally, consider saving your documents with Unix line endings, not legacy DOS or (classic) Mac line endings, which don't help and may hurt, especially down the line as we get further and further from those legacy systems.
An HTML document with valid HTML5, UTF-8 encoding, and Unix line endings is a job well done. You can share and edit and store and read and recover and rely on that document in many contexts. It's lingua franca. It's digital paper.
<meta charset="utf-8"> was introduced with/for HTML5.
As mentioned in the documentation, both are valid. However, <meta charset="utf-8"> is only for HTML5 (and easier to type/remember).
In due time, the old style is bound to become deprecated in the near future. I'd stick to the new <meta charset="utf-8">. There's only one way, but up. In tech's case, that's phasing out the old (really, REALLY fast)
Documentation: HTML meta charset Attribute—W3Schools
While not contesting the other answers, I think the following is worthy of mentioning.
The “long” (http-equiv) notation and the “short” one are equal. Whichever comes first wins;
Web server headers will override all the <meta> tags;
BOM (byte order mark) will override everything, and in many cases it will affect HTML 4 (and probably other stuff, too);
If you don't declare any encoding, you will probably get your text in “fallback text encoding” that is defined your browser. Neither in Firefox nor in Chrome it's UTF-8;
In absence of other clues the browser will attempt to read your document as if it was in ASCII to get the encoding, so you can't use any weird encodings (UTF-16 with BOM should do, though);
While the specifications say that the encoding declaration must be within the first 512 bytes of the document, most browsers will try reading more than that.
You can test by running echo 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\nContent-type: text/html; charset=windows-1251\r\n\r\n\xef\xbb\xbf<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta charset="windows-1251"><title>привет</title></head><body>привет</body></html>' | nc -lp 4500 and pointing your browser at localhost:4500. (Of course you will want to change or remove parts. The BOM part is \xef\xbb\xbf. Be wary of the encoding of your shell.)
Please mind that it's very important that you explicitly declare the encoding. Letting browsers guess can lead to security issues.
Use <meta charset="utf-8" /> for web browsers when using HTML5.
Use <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> when using HTML4 or XHTML, or for outdated DOM parsers, like DOMDocument in PHP 5.3.
To embed a signature in an email, I would use the long version:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
The reason is that not many email readers use HTML5, so it's always better use old HTML styles. Actually, it's better to use tables than divs + CSS as well.
There is some news based on Mozilla Foundation, and SitePoint:
Do not use this value (http-equiv=content-type) as it is obsolete.
Prefer the charset attribute on the <meta> element.
I recently updated a page I'm working on to work in HTML 5. For some reason when I changed my headers the £ sign that is included on all of the prices is no longer recognised and is showing as a white '?' in a black diamond.
Can anyone explain how to fix this? I have a feeling it has something to do with the <meta charset="utf-8"> line in my head, but could be mistaken.
Any help would be much appreciated!
Thanks!
You need to actually encode your HTML document in UTF-8. <meta charset="utf-8"> tells the browser that the document is supposedly encoded in UTF-8 and that the browser should treat it as such. A UTF-8 replacement character � means an invalid UTF-8 byte sequence was found at that point, which means your document is not actually encoded in UTF-8.
If you tell the browser it's UTF-8, then it must be UTF-8 that you send. It sounds like you're not sending valid UTF-8 sequences. You can probably fix this by doing one of the following:
Make sure you're saving the script(s) as UTF-8 in your editor. (Recommended)
Save the script(s) as ISO-8859-1, and use utf8_encode() on any output.
I would like to write the character "▼" (Alt + 31) on HTML but it always shows me question mark.
What do I need to do in order to make my browser display it correctly ?
Thanks!
It's probably an encoding problem. Your file is saved with a certain character encoding, but your browser displays it with another encoding — either because you didn't specify a charset in the header, or a different charset from the files charset.
One solution is to edit and save your files using UTF-8, and also add UTF-8 to the charset:
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</head>
What's probably better though, is to use HTML entities. Example: © becomes ©. You still need to specify the charset though, but this way you don't have to worry about saving your file the wrong way and losing all the special characters.
There are many lists (random example) with all the available characters and their entities. However, not all characters have their own entity. For those you'll need to use their Unicode code. In this case you're looking for a "Black down-pointing triangle" which is ▼ and becomes ▼.
i have a website in which i have to put some lines in Arabic.... how to do it...
where to get the Arabic text characters... how to make the page support Arabic...
i have to put a line per page and there is a lotta lotta pages so can't go around making images and putting them...
This is the answer that was required but everybody answered only part one of many.
Step 1 - You cannot have the multilingual characters in unicode document.. convert the document to UTF-8 document
advanced editors don't make it simple for you... go low level...
use notepad to save the document as meName.html & change the encoding
type to UTF-8
Step 2 - Mention in your html page that you are going to use such characters by
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">
Step 3 - When you put in some characters make sure your container tags have the following 2 properties set
dir='rtl'
lang='ar'
Step 4 - Get the characters from some specific tool\editor or online editor like i did with Arabic-Keyboard.org
example
<p dir="rtl" lang="ar" style="color:#e0e0e0;font-size:20px;">رَبٍّ زِدْنٍي عِلمًا</p>
NOTE: font type, font family, font face setting will have no effect on special characters
The W3C has a good introduction.
In short:
HTML is a text markup language. Text means any characters, not just ones in ASCII.
Save your text using a character encoding that includes the characters you want (UTF-8 is a good bet). This will probably require configuring your editor in a way that is specific to the particular editor you are using. (Obviously it also requires that you have a way to input the characters you want)
Make sure your server sends the correct character encoding in the headers (how you do this depends on the server software you us)
If the document you serve over HTTP specifies its encoding internally, then make sure that is correct too
If anything happens to the document between you saving it and it being served up (e.g. being put in a database, being munged by a server side script, etc) then make sure that the encoding isn't mucked about with on the way.
You can also represent any unicode character with ASCII
You not only have to put the meta tag, telling that it is UTF-8 but really make the document UTF-8. You can do that with good editors (like notepad++) by converting them to "unicode" or "UTF-8 without BOM". Than you can simply use arabic characters
As this page is UTF-8, here are some examples (I hope I don't write anything rude here): شغف
If you use a server side scripting language make sure that it does not output the page in a different encoding. In PHP e.g. you can set it like this:
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
If you don't even know where to get Arabic characters, but you want to display them, then you're doing something wrong.
Save files containing Arabic characters with encoding UTF-8. A good editor allows you to set the character encoding.
In the HTML page, place the following after <head>:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">
If you're using XHTML:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
That's it.
An alternative way (without messing with the encoding of a file), is using HTML escape sequences. This website does that jobs for you: http://www.htmlescape.net/
Won't you need the ensure the area where you display the Arabic is Right-to-Left orientated also?
e.g.
<p dir="rtl">
i edit the html page with notepad ++ ,set encoding to utf-8 and its work
As mentioned above, by default text editors will not use UTF-8 as the standard encoding for documents.
However most editors will allow you to change that in the settings. Even for each specific document.
Check you have <meta charset="utf-8"> inside head block.
I'm currently doing some HTML that with urdu, farsi and chinese simplified characters. I'm having problems finding good resources online on what charset to use:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=???" />
Any suggestions?
UTF-8 can encode any character in any language in the Unicode standard, is ASCII-compatible and is well-supported these days. There's little reason not to use it for everything.
I suggest using UTF-8, that can encode any Unicode character.
But apart from declaring the encoding in the document itself, it’s more important that your code is actually encoded in UTF-8. So get yourself a editor that can handle this encoding properly and declare the encoding in the HTTP header as it has a higher priority.
UTF-8