Encoding of Files for PHP project

Question

I am developing a php project which is in HTML5. Following is the meta used for all pages in my website.

<meta charset="utf-8"> 

I am coding in windows machine using NetBeans. I was not really aware of encoding of the files. Since the code was working fine, i was not giving importance for this.

However, based on some of the questions in stackoverflow, I could understand more about encoding. I noticed that many php/js/css files of my project are saved in UTF-8 encoding whereas some php/js/css files are saved in ANSI encoding. (to understand this, i opened the file in notepad, clicked on save as and checked the default encoding shown).

It seems the files in which I pasted some of the unicode characters were autosaved in UTF-8 and all other files were saved in ANSI encoding (I guess it might be Windows-1252). All this happened even though I set project preference as UTF-8 in netbeans.

Is it required to save those files (files which does not use unicode) also to UTF-8 as my html meta says UTF-8? (Note that there are no issues when I tested my website, but my testing was from a windows machine)

I am also curious to know, how the browser render the web page correctly though some of the php files are saved in ANSI but served with meta UTF-8.

Answer 1

(to understand this, i opened the file in notepad, clicked on save as and checked the default encoding shown).

This isn't an accurate way of checking the encoding of a file.

Files which contain only ASCII characters -- like most CSS and Javascript source files! -- are valid in most text encodings. Notepad will call them "ANSI" because that's its default, but they're also perfectly valid as UTF-8. No conversion is necessary.