Character set recognition

Character set recognition defines which character sets Internet Explorer recognises in the HTTP header of HTTP replies, and which character set it recognises in the <meta> tag. It also specifies which built-in character set translation the character set maps to.

Table of base charsets, display names, and aliases

In the following table, the base character set is the basic translation built into IE3. Aliases lists all other character set IDs that are recognised and can be represented without translation, using the "base charset" translation method. This does not, in all cases, mean that alias and base character set represent the same character set; the alias character set can be a subset of the base character set. Base charset is not a recognised name unless repeated in the "aliases" column.

Base Character	Display Name	Aliases
1252	Western	us-ascii, iso8859-1, ascii, iso_8859-1, iso-8859-1, ANSI_X3.4-1968, iso-ir-6, ANSI_X3.4-1986, ISO_646.irv:1991, ISO646-US, us, IBM367, cp367, csASCII, latin1, iso_8859-1:1987, iso-ir-100, ibm819, cp819
28592	Central European (ISO)	iso8859-2, iso-8859-2, iso_8859-2, latin2, iso_8859-2:1987, iso-ir-101, l2, csISOLatin2
1250	Central European (Windows)	windows-1250, x-cp1250
1251	Cyrillic (Windows)	windows-1251, x-cp1251
1253	Greek (Windows)	windows-1253
1254	Turkish (Windows)	windows-1254
932	Shift-JIS	shift_jis, x-sjis, ms_Kanji, csShiftJIS
EUC-JP	EUC	Extended_UNIX_Code_Packed_Format_for_Japanese, csEUCPkdFmtJapanese, x-euc-jp
JIS	JIS	csISO2022JP, iso-2022-jp
1257	windows-1257
950	Traditional Chinese (BIG5)	big5, csbig5, x-x-big5
936	Simplified Chinese	GB_2312-80, iso-ir-58, chinese, csISO58GB231280, csGB2312, gb2312
20866	Cyrillic (KOI8-R)	csKOI8R, koi8-r
949	Korean	ks_c_5601, ks_c_5601-1987, korean, csKSC56011987

Correct Usage

The correct usage is as specified in RFC 1341. For example:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; 
charset=Windows-1251">

This should be in or before <head> but certainly before <body>.

Priority

The following list shows the priorities of character set declarations that Internet Explorer will use.

Use any character set parameter passed in the HTTP content-type

Use the <meta> tag

Use the user preference for default document encoding

A frameset can have different character sets per frame.

Position of <meta .. charset=..> in the page

The <meta ... charset...> sequence can appear anywhere in the document before the <body> tag. In any case, it affects the whole document, including <title>, appearing before the <meta ... charset...> tag.