// Tutorial //

How To Set UTF-8 Using meta charset in HTML

Published on August 19, 2016 · Updated on September 23, 2020
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    By Alligator.io

    How To Set UTF-8 Using meta charset in HTML

    Introduction

    UTF-8 is the most most common character encoding on the web. You can set UTF-8 encoding and other formats using the <meta charset> tag in HTML5.

    Prerequisites

    Using the <meta charset> HTML tag to set UTF-8

    The first element after the opening <head> tag of your documents should be a <meta charset> tag to define the character set in use. The UTF-8 charset is the right choice for the modern web. Here’s the markup for it:

    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    

    This is how the charset definition works in HTML5

    Conclusion

    <meta charset> is only one of many common tags in HTML5.

    For a more comprehensive review of the HTML5 markup language, explore our series, How To Build a Website in HTML.

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    About the authors
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    Alligator.io

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