The charset attribute on a meta tag specifies to the browser what character encoding to use for the page.
Browsers uses this information to properly render the web page.
A charset attribute on a meta element.
With this setting, the page will use UTF-8 character encoding.
<meta charset="UTF-8">
meta = metadata
The charset attribute specifies what character encoding the page uses.
Browsers need to know what character set to use to be able to properly render the HTML page.
Tip: On an HTML5 web page, with <!DOCTYPE html>, the charset defaults to UTF-8.
This is usually the desired setting making the meta charset setting unnecessary.
<meta charset="character-set">
| Value | Description |
|---|---|
| ISO-8859-1 | The default character set for HTML4. Not case-sensitive. |
| UTF-8 | The default character set for HTML5. Not case-sensitive. |
For additional details about Charsets see our HTML Charset Reference.
Here is when charset support started for each browser:
 Chrome
|
1.0 | Sep 2008 |
 Firefox
|
1.0 | Sep 2002 |
 IE/Edge
|
1.0 | Aug 1995 |
 Opera
|
1.0 | Jan 2006 |
 Safari
|
1.0 | Jan 2003 |
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