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HTML Academy · Lesson

charset and Unicode Handling Special Characters

Use UTF-8 and HTML entities to display any character correctly.

The charset Declaration

Every HTML document must declare its character encoding. The standard is UTF-8: <meta charset="utf-8"> as the very first element of <head>. Without it, the browser guesses, which often goes wrong for non-ASCII text.

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title>Page</title>

Why UTF-8?

UTF-8 encodes every Unicode character: every script, every emoji, every symbol. It is backward-compatible with ASCII (a-z, 0-9 stay single-byte) and is the dominant encoding on the modern web — over 98% of pages by 2024 are UTF-8.

All lessons in this course

  1. The lang Attribute and Screen Readers
  2. dir=rtl for Right-to-Left Text
  3. The bdi and bdo Elements
  4. charset and Unicode Handling Special Characters
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