How to change the default encoding to UTF-8 for Apache

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I am using a hosting company and it will list the files in a directory if the file index.html is not there. It uses ISO 8859-1 as the default encoding.

If the server is Apache, is there a way to set UTF-8 as the default instead?

I found out that it is actually using a DOCTYPE of HTML 3.2 and then there is not charset at all... so it is not setting any encoding. But is there a way to change it to use UTF-8?

apache-config character-encoding apache
13 Answers

In httpd.conf add (or change if it's already there):

AddDefaultCharset utf-8
user_1128700

See AddDefaultCharset Directive, AddCharset Directive, and this article.

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

But I have to use Chinese characters now and then. Previously, I translated Chinese characters to Unicode code and include it in the document using the &# hack. But it is only useful for page having a few characters.

There is a better way to do that: encode the charset information in the filename, and apache will output the proper encoding header based on that. This is possible thanks to the AddCharset lines in the conf file, such as the line below:

conf/httpd.conf:

AddCharset UTF-8 .utf8

So if you have a file whose names ends in .html.utf8, apache will serve the page as if it is encoded in UTF-8 and will dump the proper character-encoding directive in the header accordingly.

user_38270

I'm not sure whether you have access to the Apache config (httpd.conf) but you should be able to set an AddDefaultCharset Directive. See:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html

Look for the mod_mime.c module and make sure the following is set:

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

or the equivalent Apache 1.x docs (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset).

However, this only works when "the response content-type is text/plain or text/html".

You should also make sure that your pages have a charset set as well. See this for more info:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/charset.html

user_828650

This is untested, but it will probably work.

In your .htaccess file, add:

<Files ~ "\.html?$">  
     Header set Content-Type "text/html; charset=utf-8"
</Files>

However, this will require mod_headers on the server.

user_1008350

<meta charset='utf-8'> overrides the Apache default charset (cf /etc/apache2/conf.d/charset)

If this is not enough, then you probably created your original file with the ISO 8859-1 encoding character set. You have to convert it to the proper character set:

iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 source_file.php -o new file.php
user_144679500

In my case I added this to file .htaccess:

AddDefaultCharset off
AddDefaultCharset windows-1252
user_19324940
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