HTML Charset

To display an HTML page correctly, a web browser must know which character set (encoding) was used to write the page. Without the correct charset, special characters may appear as strange symbols or question marks.

What is Character Encoding?

Computers store text as numbers (bytes). A character encoding is a mapping between those numbers and actual characters (letters, digits, symbols).

For example, in ASCII:

65 → A
66 → B
97 → a
48 → 0

The meta charset Tag

Always specify the character encoding near the top of your HTML <head>:

<meta charset="UTF-8">

Important: If you omit the <meta charset> tag, browsers may guess the encoding incorrectly, causing characters like é, ñ, ü, € to display as garbled text.

ASCII — The First Encoding

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was the first character encoding standard. It defined 128 characters using 7-bit numbers (0–127):

English letters (A–Z, a–z)
Digits (0–9)
Basic punctuation (. , ! ? ; : etc.)
Control characters (line feed, tab, etc.)

ASCII only supports English and has no support for accented letters, foreign scripts, or symbols.

ANSI — Windows Default

ANSI (Windows-1252) extended ASCII to support 256 characters — adding accented Western European letters like é, ñ, ü. It was the default charset in older Windows HTML editors.

Charset	Characters	Languages Supported
ASCII	128	English only
ANSI (Windows-1252)	256	Western European languages
ISO-8859-1	256	Western European languages
UTF-8	1,112,064+	All languages, symbols, emojis

UTF-8 — The Modern Standard

UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format — 8-bit) is the recommended charset for all HTML pages. It covers:

All ASCII characters (backward compatible)
Accented and special characters from all Western languages
All world scripts — Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, etc.
Mathematical and technical symbols
Emojis 😀 🚀 🎉

Best Practice: Always use UTF-8 for all your HTML pages. It is the default encoding for HTML5 and supported by every modern browser and device in the world.

The Full Charset Declaration

Here is the recommended complete head section for any HTML5 page with proper charset:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>

    <p>Hello World — supports all characters: é ñ ü 😀 € مرحبا</p>

</body>
</html>

ASCII Character Reference (0–127)

Decimal	Character	Decimal	Character	Decimal	Character
32	(space)	65	A	97	a
33	!	66	B	98	b
34	"	67	C	99	c
35	#	68	D	100	d
36	$	69	E	101	e
37	%	70	F	102	f
38	&	71	G	103	g
39	'	72	H	104	h
40	(	73	I	105	i
41	)	74	J	106	j
48	0	75	K	107	k
49	1	76	L	108	l
50	2	77	M	109	m
51	3	90	Z	122	z

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