Character Set Recognition

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Internet Explorer uses the character set specified for a document to determine how to translate the bytes in the document into characters on the screen or paper. By default, Internet Explorer uses the character set specified in the HTTP content type returned by the server to determine this translation. If this parameter is not given, Internet Explorer uses the character set specified by the META element in the document. It uses the user's preferences if no META element is given.

You can use the META element to explicitly set the character set for a document. In this case, you set the HTTP-EQUIV= attribute to "Content-Type" and specify a character set identifier in the CONTENT= attribute. For example, the following META element identifies Windows-1251 as the character set for the document.

As long as you place the META element before the BODY element, it affects the whole document, including the TITLE element. For clarity it should appear as the first element after HEAD so that all readers know the encoding before the first displayable is parsed. Note that the META element applies to the document containing it. This means, for example, that a compound document (a document consisting of two or more documents in a set of frames) can use different character sets in different frames.

Windows Codepage #	Display name	Preferred ID on SAVE	Internet Explorer 4 Aliases
1252	Western	iso-8859-1 except when 128-159 is used, use "Windows-1252"	iso8859-1, 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, Windows-1252
20105		us-ascii	us-acii, ascii
28592	Central European (ISO)	iso-8859-2	iso8859-2, iso-8859-2, iso_8859-2, latin2, iso_8859-2:1987, iso-ir-101, l2, csISOLatin2
1250	Central European (Windows)	Windows-1250	Windows-1250, x-cp1250
1251	Cyrillic (Windows)	Windows-1251	Windows-1251, x-cp1251
1253	Greek (Windows)	Windows-1253	Windows-1253
1254	Turkish (Windows)	Windows-1254	Windows-1254
932	Japanese (Shift-JIS)	shift_jis	shift_jis, x-sjis, ms_Kanji, csShiftJIS, x-ms-cp932
51932	Japanese (EUC)	x-euc-jp	Extended_UNIX_Code_Packed_Format_for_Japanese, csEUCPkdFmtJapanese, x-euc-jp, x-euc
50220	Japanese (JIS)	iso-2022-jp	csISO2022JP, iso-2022-jp
1257	Baltic (Windows)	Windows-1257	windows-1257
950	Traditional Chinese (BIG5)	big5	big5, csbig5, x-x-big5
936	Simplified Chinese (GB2312)	gb2312	GB_2312-80, iso-ir-58, chinese, csISO58GB231280, csGB2312, gb2312
20866	Cyrillic (KOI8-R)	koi8-r	csKOI8R, koi8-r
949	Korean (KSC5601)	ks_c_5601	ks_c_5601, ks_c_5601-1987, korean, csKSC56011987
1255 (logical)	Hebrew (ISO-logical)	Windows-1255	iso-8859-8i
1255 (visual)	Hebrew (ISO-Visual)	iso-8859-8	ISO-8859-8 Visual, ISO-8859-8 , ISO_8859-8, visual
862	Hebrew (DOS)	dos-862	dos-862
1256	Arabic (Windows)	Windows-1256	Windows-1256
720	Arabic (DOS)	dos-720	dos-720
874	Thai	Windows-874	Windows-874
1258	Vietnamese	Windows-1258	Windows-1258
65001	Unicode UTF-8	UTF-8	UTF-8, unicode-1-1-utf-8, unicode-2-0-utf-8
65000	Unicode UTF-7	UNICODE-1-1-UTF-7	utf-7, UNICODE-1-1-UTF-7, csUnicode11UTF7, utf-7
50225	Korean (ISO)	ISO-2022-KR	ISO-2022-KR, csISO2022KR
52936	Simplified Chinese (HZ)	HZ-GB-2312	HZ-GB-2312
28594	Baltic (ISO)	iso-8869-4	ISO_8859-4:1988, iso-ir-110, ISO_8859-4, ISO-8859-4, latin4, l4, csISOLatin4
28585	Cyrillic (ISO)	iso_8859-5	ISO_8859-5:1988, iso-ir-144, ISO_8859-5, ISO-8859-5, cyrillic, csISOLatinCyrillic, csISOLatin5
28597	Greek (ISO)	iso-8859-7	ISO_8859-7:1987, iso-ir-126, ISO_8859-7, ISO-8859-7, ELOT_928, ECMA-118, greek, greek8, csISOLatinGreek
28599	Turkish (ISO)	iso-8859-9	ISO_8859-9:1989, iso-ir-148, ISO_8859-9, ISO-8859-9, latin5, l5, csISOLatin5


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