The garbled code on the web page may be a character set error. The role of the character set is to tell the browser which way to decode the web page content. If the settings are wrong, it will cause garbled code and affect SEO and user experience. HTML5 recommends adding <meta charset="UTF-8"> to
to set the character set, and should be placed near the beginning of the document. Old websites may use GBK encoding, but they are no longer recommended. Incorrect character set settings may cause Chinese to display as question marks or garbled codes, and search engines may not recognize the content. The server side also needs to set a character set, such as the Content-Type field in the HTTP header, which is more important in dynamic pages. The HTML file storage encoding must be consistent with the declaration, otherwise an error may still occur. UTF-8 is recommended when it comes to multilingual content. You can check the character set settings with tools such as W3C Validator. Only by ensuring that HTML, server and file storage are coding consistently can most garbled problems be avoided.Web page displays garbled code? Maybe the character set is not clear. The role of character sets in HTML is actually to tell the browser how to decode web page content. Common UTF-8 can cover almost all language characters. If the settings are correct, Chinese, English, and emojis can be displayed normally; if the settings are wrong, the garbled code will be at the least, and the SEO and user experience will be affected.

How to set a character set in HTML?
In the HTML5 standard, the most recommended method is to add this line of meta tag in :
<meta charset="UTF-8">
This tag must be placed near the beginning of the document, the earlier the better, to avoid character parsing errors during the loading process of the browser. Some old websites are still using:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=GBK">
Although this writing method can also take effect, it is not necessary unless you really only need to support the old system that supports Chinese GB2312 or GBK encoding.
What problems will occur if the character set is wrong?
The most intuitive thing is that the content of the web page becomes garbled. For example, web pages actually use UTF-8 encoding, but the meta declares ISO-8859-1, so the browser may display Chinese as a bunch of question marks or garbled characters. Sometimes, users can see the correct content manually by "switching encoding" in the browser, but this is too complicated for ordinary users.

In addition, if the content cannot be identified when search engines crawl, it may also affect the inclusion and ranking. If your web page content is OK but your search ranking is not up, don't forget to check whether the character set is set correctly.
Do I need to set the character set on the server side?
Yes, just writing meta in HTML is not enough. The HTTP header returned by the server should also include character set information, such as:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
In this way, the browser can know which encoding method to parse before loading HTML. Especially when dynamically generating pages (such as PHP, Node.js), server-side settings are particularly important. Some CMS systems do not set encoding by default, resulting in inconsistent settings of the front-end and back-end, which is prone to problems.
Some details that are easy to ignore
- The saving encoding of the HTML file itself must be consistent with the declaration : for example, if you write UTF-8 in HTML, but the file is saved as GBK, there may still be an error when the browser parses it.
- Compatibility of different languages : If the web page only displays English, it can also be done with ISO-8859-1, but once it involves multilingual content such as Chinese, Japanese, Russian, etc., UTF-8 is almost the only choice.
- Verify encoding using online tools : You can use some online HTML verification tools (such as W3C Validator) to check whether the character set of the web page is set correctly.
Basically that's it. Character set settings don't seem complicated, but they can easily be ignored, especially when multi-person collaborative development or migration from old projects. Confirm that the encoding between HTML, server and file storage is consistent, and most garbled problems can be avoided.
The above is the detailed content of Understanding Character Sets in HTML. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!

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