HTML5 Encoding & Cyrillic

Asked 29/3, 2014 at 19:45 Answered 24/4, 2014 at 20:14

Something that made me curious - supposedly the default character encoding in HTML5 is UTF-8. However if I have a plain simple HTML file with an HTML5 doctype like the code below, I get:

"hello" in Russian: "Ð—Ð´Ñ€Ð°ÑÑ‚Ð²ÑƒÐ¹Ñ‚Ðµ"

In Chrome 33+, Safari 6, IE11, etc.

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head></head>

<body>
    <p>"hello" in Russian is "здраствуйте"</p>
</body>

</html>

What gives? Shouldn't the browser utilize the UTF-8 unicode standard and display the text correctly? I'm using Coda which is set to save html files with UTF-8 encoding by default so that's not the problem.

Landry answered 29/3, 2014 at 19:45 Comment(2)

you can save your file as anything you want - browser will not be on your system but on user and you never know what settings their browser have. – Dicast 24/4, 2014 at 20:17

"hello" in Russian is "здраствуйте" it is wrong! "hello" in Russian is "здравствуйте"! – Pinstripe 3/11, 2016 at 19:54

The text data in the example is UTF-8 encoded text misinterpreted as window-1252 encoded. The reason is that the encoding has not been specified and browsers are forced to make a guess. To fix this, specify the encoding; see the W3C page Character encodings. Two simple ways that work independently of server settings, as long as the server does not send wrong encoding information in HTTP headers:

1) Save the file as UTF-8 with BOM (there is probably an option for this in your authoring program.

2) Add the following tag into the head part:

<meta charset=utf-8>

There is no single default encoding specified for HTML5. On the contrary, browsers are expected to make guesses when no encoding has been declared. This is a fairly complex process, described in 8.2.2.2 Determining the character encoding.

Juggler answered 29/3, 2014 at 23:1 Comment(0)

If you want to be sure which charset will be used by browser you must have in your page head

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

otherwise you are at the mercy of local settings and browser automation.

Dicast answered 24/4, 2014 at 20:14 Comment(0)

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