# Description

The @charset parser directive is used to specify the character encoding of an external style sheet.

The character set name must be a valid encoding name from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

This directive has the form:

    @charset "encoding";

Note: The @charset directive must appear before anything else in the file.

The following table lists the different character-sets being used around the world:

Character Set | Description
--- | ---
ISO-8859-1 | Latin alphabet part 1: North America, Western Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, Africa
ISO-8859-2 | Latin alphabet part 2: Eastern Europe
ISO-8859-3 | Latin alphabet part 3: SE Europe, Esperanto, miscellaneous others
ISO-8859-4 | Latin alphabet part 4: Scandinavia/Baltics (and others not in ISO-8859-1)
ISO-8859-5 | Latin/Cyrillic part 5: The languages that are using a Cyrillic alphabet such as Bulgarian, Belarusian, Russian and Macedonian
ISO-8859-6 | Latin/Arabic part 6: The languages that are using the Arabic alphabet
ISO-8859-7 | Latin/Greek part 7: The modern Greek language as well as mathematical symbols derived from the Greek
ISO-8859-8 | Latin/Hebrew part 8: The languages that are using the Hebrew alphabet
ISO-8859-9 | Latin 5 part 9: The Turkish language. Same as ISO-8859-1 except Turkish characters replace Icelandic ones
ISO-8859-10 | Latin 6 Lappish, Nordic, Eskimo: The Nordic languages
ISO-8859-15 | Latin 9 (aka Latin 0): Similar to ISO 8859-1 but replaces some less common symbols with the euro sign and some other missing characters
ISO-2022-JP | Latin/Japanese part 1: The Japanese language
ISO-2022-JP-2 | Latin/Japanese part 2: The Japanese language
ISO-2022-KR | Latin/Korean part 1: The Korean language

# Examples

This example indicates that the style sheet will use ISO-8859-1 character encoding:

    @charset "ISO-8859-1";

# Browser Support

Firefox | IE | Chrome | Opera | Safari

# Miscellaneous Information

Defined In: | CSS2