What is a Charset?

A commonly asked question about programming terminology is – what is a charset?

The term charset, is short for “character set”. Charsets are identifiers used to describe a series of universal characters used in web and internet protocols such as HTML and Microsoft Windows.

Universal characters are used in many languages for encoding and for designating a font format for pages or to digitally represent text. A charset table or tables list the type of charsets and its standard. Unicode, ascii and iso are types of charsets that reference text or universal symbols or characters used in various languages and meta tags.

Ascii stands for “American Standard Code for Computer Information Interchange”. Unicode can be used for almost all worldwide languages including Latin, European Languages, Arabic and even Japanese and Chinese. The letters en are sometimes used in file content or in a header as part of a charset.

Users of charsets can usually note several differences in various types of charsets as one version may differ quite notably from another. Various authoring tools may be used to identify related charsets so the user can tell what type of languages they are dealing with when programming or working with source documents.


In some systems, a server will change character encoding to the default charset used. Charsets are not usually an issue unless they are not set right then they become quite important as they may present issues in the way that a document or web page is displayed.

// posted by BasicMichelle on 8/23/2005 12:37:00 PM / Permanent Link