The @charset CSS at-rule specifies the character encoding used in the style sheet. It must be the first element in the style sheet and not be preceded by any character; as it is not a nested statement, it cannot be used inside conditional group at-rules. If several @charset at-rules are defined, only the first one is used, and it cannot be used inside a style attribute on an HTML element or inside the <style> element where the character set of the HTML page is relevant.

@charset "utf-8"; 

@charset

The @charset CSS at-rule specifies the character encoding used in the style sheet. It must be the first element in the style sheet and not be preceded by any character; as it is not a nested statement, it cannot be used inside conditional group at-rules. If several @charset at-rules are defined, only the first one is used, and it cannot be used inside a style attribute on an HTML element or inside the <style> element where the character set of the HTML page is relevant.

@charset "utf-8"; 

This at-rule is useful when using non-ASCII characters in some CSS properties, like content.

As there are several ways to define the character encoding of a style sheet, the browser will try the following methods in the following order (and stop as soon as one yields a result) :

The value of the Unicode byte-order character placed at the beginning of the file. The value given by the charset attribute of the Content-Type: HTTP header or the equivalent in the protocol used to serve the style sheet. The @charset CSS at-rule. Use the character encoding defined by the referring document: the charset attribute of the <link> element. This method is obsoleted in HTML5 and must not be used. Assume that the document is UTF-8

Syntax

@charset "UTF-8"; @charset "iso-8859-15"; 

where:

charset

Is a <string> denoting the character encoding to be used. It must be the name of a web-safe character encoding defined in the IANA-registry, and must be double-quoted, following exactly one space character (U+0020), and immediately terminated with a semicolon. If several names are associated with an encoding, only the one marked with preferred must be used.

Formal syntax

@charset "<charset>";

Examples

Valid and invalid charset declarations

@charset "UTF-8";       /* Set the encoding of the style sheet to Unicode UTF-8 */ @charset 'iso-8859-15'; /* Invalid, wrong quoting style used */ @charset  "UTF-8";      /* Invalid, more than one space */  @charset "UTF-8";      /* Invalid, there is a character (a space) before the at-rule */ @charset UTF-8;         /* Invalid, without ' or ", the charset is not a CSS <string> */ 

Specifications

Specification
Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) Specification # charset①

See also

Character set glossary entry Unicode glossary entry

Last modified: Feb 2, 2022, by MDN contributors

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