Character Encoding Test Page

In most character encoding schemes the characters in the lower range from 0 to 127 are identical with the ASCII charset. The following 32 characters from 128 to 159 are control characters and should not be used in character encodings. Nevertheless Microsoft ignored this standard when developing its codepages and assigned characters to this range as well. The following chart will however not show this range but start with character 160. When you pick a character encoding from the below list or type in your own choice the page reloads with this encoding showing the respective character encoding in the chart. For this to work as intended you must set your browsers character encoding either to automatic detection or choose the same charset for your browser as you did for this page.

Depending on the character encoding some characters typed in via keyboard will not be rendered properly. In exceptional cases this might even ruin the page layout as happens in Internet Explorer when choosing UTF-8 encoding

This character encoding is declared in webpages and stylesheets using one or more of the following methods

declaration in <meta /> element

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

declaration in <?xml?> prolog

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

declaration in content-type field of http-headers

Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1;

declaration in stylesheet

@charset 'iso-8859-1';

A note on the term charset:
The W3C recommends using the term character encoding instead of the terms charset and character set:
Specifications SHOULD avoid using the terms 'character set' and 'charset' to refer to a character encoding, except when the latter is used to refer to the MIME charset parameter or its IANA-registered values. The term 'character encoding', or in specific cases the terms 'character encoding form' or 'character encoding scheme', are RECOMMENDED.