HTML Charsets

The HTML charset Attribute

To display an HTML page correctly, a web browser must know which character set to use.

The character set is specified in the <meta> tag:

Example

<meta charset="UTF-8">

The HTML specification encourages web developers to use the UTF-8 character set.

UTF-8 covers almost all of the characters and symbols in the world!

Learn More:

Full UTF-8 Reference

The ASCII Character Set

ASCII was the first character encoding standard for the web.

It defined 128 different latin characters that could be used on the internet:

• English letters (a-z and A-Z)

• Numbers (0-9)

• Some special characters: ! $ + - ( ) @ . # ?

The ANSI Character Set

ANSI (Windows-1252) was the first Windows character set:

• Identical to ASCII for the first 127 characters

• Special characters from 128 to 159

• Identical to UTF-8 from 160 to 255

Example

<meta charset="Windows-1252">

The ISO-8859-1 Character Set

The default character set for HTML 4 was ISO-8859-1.

It supported 256 characters:

• Identical to ASCII for the first 127 characters

• Does not use the characters from 128 to 159

• Identical to ANSI and UTF-8 from 160 to 255

HTML 4 Example

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

The UTF-8 Character Set

• Identical to ASCII for the values from 0 to 127

• Does not use the characters from 128 to 159

• Identical to ANSI and 8859-1 from 160 to 255

• Continues from the value 256 to 10 000 characters

Example

<meta charset="UTF-8">

Learn More:

Full UTF-8 Reference

HTML UTF-8 Characters

Basic Latin

ABCD abcd 0123 ?#$%

Latin Extended A

ĀĂĄ ĆĈĊ ĒĔĖĘ

Latin Extended B

ƀƁƂƃƄƅ ƆƇƈ ƉƊƋƌ

Latin Extended C

ⱠⱡⱢ ⱣⱤ ⱥⱦ ⱧⱨⱩ

Latin Extended D

Ꜧꜧ ꜨꜩꜪꜫ ꜬꜭꜮꜯ

Latin Extended E

ꬰꬱ ꬲꬳꬴ ꬵꬶ ꬷꬸꬹ

IPA Extentions

ɖɜɣ ɘɫɛ ɱɷɞ

Spacing Modifiers

pʰ pʱ pʲ pʳ

Diacritical Marks

àáâã èéêẽ òóôõ

General Punctuation

‰ ‱ ⁒ ‼ ⁇ ⁈ ⁉ ⁎ ⁑ ⁂

Super and Subscript

C⁰ Cⁱ C⁴ C⁵ C₆ C₇ C₈

Braille

⠓⠑⠇⠇⠕ ⠺⠕⠗⠇⠙