How to change the default encoding to UTF-8 for Apache

Question

I am using a hosting company and it will list the files in a directory if the file index html is not there  it uses iso-8859-1 as the default encoding   If the server is Apache  is there a way to set UTF-8 as the default instead   Update  Additionally I found out that it is actually using a DOCTYPE of HTML 3 2 and then there is not charset at all    so it is not setting any encoding   But is there a way to change it to use UTF-8

User · Answer

Place AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 into  etc apache2 conf d charset  In fact  it s already there  You just have to uncomment it by removing the preceding

User · Answer

Just a hint if you have long filenames in utf-8  by default they will be shortened to 20 bytes  so it may happen that the last character might be  cut in half  and therefore unrecognized properly  Then you may want to set the following   IndexOptions Charset UTF-8 NameWidth    NameWidth setting will prevent shortening your file names  making them properly displayed and readable   As other users already mentioned  this should be added either in httpd conf or apache2 conf  if you do have admin rights  or in  htaccess  if you don t

User · Answer

Add this to your  htaccess   IndexOptions  Charset UTF-8   Or  if you have administrator rights  you could set it globally by editing httpd conf and adding   AddDefaultCharset UTF-8    You can use AddDefaultCharset in  htaccess too  but it won   t affect Apache-generated directory listings that way

User · Answer

In my case add to  htaccess  AddDefaultCharset off AddDefaultCharset windows-1252

User · Answer

In httpd conf add  or change if it s already there    AddDefaultCharset utf-8

User · Answer

For completeness  on Apache2 on Ubuntu  you will find the default charset in charset conf in conf-available   Uncomment the line   AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

User · Answer

Just leave it empty   default charset  in WHM        default charset      p s  - In WHM go --------  Home   Service Configuration   PHP Configuration Editor ----  click  Advanced Mode  ----  find  default charset  and leave it blank ---- just nothing  not utf8  not ISO

User · Answer

In  htaccess add this line   AddCharset utf-8  html  css  php  txt  js   This is for those that do not have access to their server s conf file  It is just one more thing to try when other attempts failed   As far as performance issues regarding the use of  htaccess I have not seen this   My typical page load times are 150-200 mS with or without  htaccess  What good is performance if your page does not render correctly   Most shared servers do not allow user access to the config file which is the preferred place to add a character set

User · Answer

Where all the HTML files are in UTF-8 and don t have meta tags for content type  I was only able to set the needed default for these files to be sent by Apache 2 4 by adding both directives   AddLanguage ru  html AddCharset UTF-8  html

User · Answer

See AddDefaultCharset Directive  AddCharset Directive  and this article   AddDefaultCharset utf-8      But I have to use Chinese characters   now and then  Previously  I translated   Chinese characters to Unicode code and   include it in the document using the    amp   hack  But it is only useful for   page having a few characters       There is a better way to do that    encode the charset information in the   filename  and apache will output the   proper encoding header based on that    This is possible thanks to the   AddCharset lines in the conf file    such as the line below       conf httpd conf    AddCharset UTF-8  utf8      So if you have a file whose   names ends in  html utf8  apache will   serve the page as if it is encoded in   UTF-8 and will dump the proper   character-encoding directive in the   header accordingly

User · Answer

lt meta charset  utf-8  gt  overrides the apache default charset  cf  etc apache2 conf d charset  If this is not enough  then you probably created your original file with iso-8859-1 encoding character set  You have to convert it to the proper character set  iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 source file php -o new file php

User · Answer

I m not sure whether you have access to the Apache config  httpd conf  but you should be able to set an AddDefaultCharset Directive   See   http   httpd apache org docs 2 0 mod core html  Look for the mod mime c module and make sure the following is set   AddDefaultCharset utf-8    or the equivalent Apache 1 x docs  http   httpd apache org docs 1 3 mod core html adddefaultcharset      However  this only works when  the response content-type is text plain or text html    You should also make sure that your pages have a charset set as well   See this for more info   http   www w3 org TR REC-html40 charset html

User · Answer

This is untested but will probably work   In your  htaccess file put    lt Files      html    gt         Header set Content-Type  text html  charset utf-8   lt  Files gt    However  this will require mod headers on the server

[apache] How to change the default encoding to UTF-8 for Apache?

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