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Learn Netverks

charsets

Character encodings

Declaring UTF-8 and how bytes become characters on the wire.

  • UTF-8 is the practical default: one-byte ASCII overlap, multi-byte sequences for the rest of Unicode.
  • Declare early in <head>: <meta charset="utf-8">.
  • Servers should send Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 consistently with saved bytes.
  • Mismatched declarations produce replacement characters—catch early with charset sniffing tests on staging.

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