CSS @charset rule specifies the character encoding to be used in the style sheet.
Character encoding is a method of converting individual symbols and characters into bytes. There are several encoding systems such as ‘UTF-8’, ‘ASCII’, ‘ANSI’, etc. The @charset at-rule is used to specify which of these encoding systems should be used in our document.
There are a few rules which we have to follow while using @charset at-rule:
- The @charset at-rule must be the first element in the style sheet and must not be preceded by any character.
- The @charset at-rule can not be used inside the
<style>attribute. - If several @charset at-rules are specified, only the first charset is used for encoding.
The example below sets the encoding style to ‘UTF-8’:
@charset "UTF-8";
Few valid and invalid charset declaration
@charset "UTF-8"; /* Sets the encoding style to Unicode UTF-8 */
@charset "UTF-8"; /* Invalid, there is a character (a space) before the at-rule */
@charset 'iso-8859-15'; /* Invalid, wrong quotes are used */
@charset "UTF-8"; /* Invalid, more than one space specified between @charset and "utf-8"*/
@charset UTF-8; /* Invalid, encoding system(UTF-8) must be enclosed within double quotes("") */
CSS Syntax
The @charset at-rule has the below syntax:
@charset “charset”
Property Values
| charset | Specifies the character encoding to be used in the document. |
