UTF-8 html without BOM displays strange characters

Question

I have some HTML which contains some forign characters (€, ó, á). The HTML document is saved as UTF-8 without BOM. When I view the page in the browser the forign characters

Answer 1

You are probably not specifying the correct character set in your HTML file. The BOM (thanks @Jukka) sends the browser into UTF-.8 mode; in its absence, you need to use other means to declare the document UTF.8.

If you have access to your server configuration, you may want to make sure the server isn't sending the wrong character set info. See e.g. How to change the default encoding to UTF-8 for Apache?

If you have access only to your HTML, adding this meta tag in your document's head should do the trick:

or as @Mathias points out, the new HTML 5

(valid only if you use a HTML 5 doctype, against which there is no good argument any more even if you don't use HTML 5 markup.)