Specifying the document's character encoding

There are several ways to specify which character encoding is used in the document. First, the web server can include the character encoding or charset in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) Content-Type header, which would typically look like this:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

This method gives the HTTP server a convenient way to alter document's encoding according to content negotiation; certain HTTP server software can do it, for example Apache with the module mod_charset_lite.

For HTML it is possible to include this information inside the head element near the top of the document:

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

html5 also allows the following syntax to mean exactly the same:

<meta charset="utf-8">

Character encoding in HTML: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encodings_in_HTML‎