CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlcharacter-encodingcyrillic
dkugappi
dkugappi

Reputation: 2764

HTML5 Encoding & Cyrillic

Something that made me curious - supposedly the default character encoding in HTML5 is UTF-8. However if I have a plain simple HTML file with an HTML5 doctype like the code below, I get:

"hello" in Russian: "ЗдраÑтвуйте"

In Chrome 33+, Safari 6, IE11, etc.

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head></head>

<body>
    <p>"hello" in Russian is "здраствуйте"</p>
</body>

</html>

What gives? Shouldn't the browser utilize the UTF-8 unicode standard and display the text correctly? I'm using Coda which is set to save html files with UTF-8 encoding by default so that's not the problem.

Upvotes: 14

Views: 30556

Answers (2)

All Blond
All Blond

Reputation: 822

If you want to be sure which charset will be used by browser you must have in your page head

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

otherwise you are at the mercy of local settings and browser automation.

Upvotes: 10

Jukka K. Korpela
Jukka K. Korpela

Reputation: 201728

The text data in the example is UTF-8 encoded text misinterpreted as window-1252 encoded. The reason is that the encoding has not been specified and browsers are forced to make a guess. To fix this, specify the encoding; see the W3C page Character encodings. Two simple ways that work independently of server settings, as long as the server does not send wrong encoding information in HTTP headers:

1) Save the file as UTF-8 with BOM (there is probably an option for this in your authoring program.

2) Add the following tag into the head part:

<meta charset=utf-8>

There is no single default encoding specified for HTML5. On the contrary, browsers are expected to make guesses when no encoding has been declared. This is a fairly complex process, described in 8.2.2.2 Determining the character encoding.

Upvotes: 29

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