Encoding of web pages

The file (html or php) containing the web page may be encoded with different character sets, for example ISO-8859-15 or UTF-8.

To see the encoding of a file, type for example :

file -i index.html

To convert a file from an encoding to another, for example from ISO-8859-15 to UTF-8, type :

iconv -f ISO-8859-15 -t UTF-8 mypage_iso.html -o mypage_utf8.html

The encoding may be declared by different ways, from the most prioritary to the less :

The PHP scripts sends a header, for example :

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-15');

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

This instruction must be executed before any displaying.

The encoding is declared in php.ini :

default_charset = "iso-8859-15"

default_charset = "utf-8"

The encoding is declared in the web server configuration :
```
AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-15
```
or
```
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
```
Depending on the web server version, this information may be in different places, for example :
- the web server configuration file httpd.conf or apache2.conf
- in /etc/apache2/conf.d/charset
- in /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/charset.conf

A meta tag in the web page, for examples :

<meta charset="ISO-8859-15">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-15" />
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

Links :