HTML Character Sets

To display an HTML page correctly, a web browser must know the character set (character encoding) to use.

This is specified in the <meta> tag:

<meta charset="UTF-8">

Common Character Sets

Character Set	Description
ASCII	The first character set standard (also called ISO-646). Defines 128 characters: numbers (0-9), English letters (A-Z), and some special characters like ! $ + - ( ) @ < > .
ANSI	The default character set for Windows up to Windows 95. ANSI is an extension of ASCII that adds 128 extra characters.
ISO-8859-1	The default character set for HTML 4. Also an extension of ASCII.
UTF-8	Covers almost all of the characters and symbols in the world. The default character set for HTML5.

ASCII uses the values from 0 to 127 to represent characters.

ASCII includes letters, numbers, and symbols.

ANSI is identical to ASCII for the values 0-127.

ANSI has a proprietary set of characters for the values 128-159.

ANSI is identical to UTF-8 for the values 160-255.

ISO-8859-1 is identical to ASCII for the values 0-127.

ISO-8859-1 does not use the values 128-159.

ISO-8859-1 is identical to UTF-8 for the values 160-255.

UTF-8 is identical to ASCII for the values 0-127.

UTF-8 does not use the values 128-159.

UTF-8 is identical to both ANSI and 8859-1 for the values 160-255.

UTF-8 continues from the value 256 with more than 10,000 different characters.