what is <meta charset=“utf-8”>?

Question

I just started learning HTML (no coding background) and don\'t know what this means. I generally write it when I start the code after but have no idea what it means. I also do

Answer 1

The characters you are reading on your screen now each have a numerical value. In the ASCII format, for example, the letter 'A' is 65, 'B' is 66, and so on. If you look at a table of characters available in ASCII you will see that it isn't much use for someone who wishes to write something in Mandarin, Arabic, or Japanese. For characters / words from those languages to be displayed we needed another system of encoding them to and from numbers stored in computer memory.

UTF-8 is just one of the encoding methods that were invented to implement this requirement. It lets you write text in all kinds of languages, so French accents will appear perfectly fine, as will text like this

Бзиа збаша (Bzia zbaşa), Фэсапщы, Ç'kemi, ሰላም, and even right-to-left writing such as this السلام عليكم

If you copy and paste the above text into notepad and then try to save the file as ANSI (another format) you will receive a warning that saving in this format will lose some of the formatting. Accept it, then re-load the text file and you'll see something like this

???? ????? (Bzia zbasa), ???????, Ç'kemi, ???, and even right-to-left writing such as this ?????? ?????

Answer 2

That meta tag basically specifies which character set a website is written with.

Here is a definition of UTF-8:

UTF-8 (U from Universal Character Set + Transformation Format—8-bit) is a character encoding capable of encoding all possible characters (called code points) in Unicode. The encoding is variable-length and uses 8-bit code units.