@charset

Summary

The @charset CSS at-rule specifies the character encoding used in the style sheet. It must be the first element in the style sheet and not be preceded by any character; as it is not a nested statement, it cannot be used inside conditional group at-rules. If several @charset at-rules are defined, only the first one is used, and it cannot be used inside a style attribute on an HTML element or inside the <style> element where the character set of the HTML page is relevant.

This at-rule is useful when using non-ASCII characters in some CSS properties, like content.

As there are several ways to define the character encoding of a style sheet, the browser will try the following methods in the following order (and stop as soon as one yields a result) :

The value of the Unicode byte-order character placed at the beginning of the file.
The value given by the charset attribute of the Content-Type: HTTP header or the equivalent in the protocol used to serve the style sheet.
The @charset CSS at-rule.
Use the character encoding defined by the referring document: the charset attribute of the <link> element. This method is obsoleted in HTML5 and must not be used.
Assume that the document is UTF-8

Syntax

@charset "UTF-8";
@charset 'iso-8859-15';

where:

charset: Is a <string> denoting the character encoding to be used. It must be the name of a web-safe character encoding defined in the IANA-registry. If several names are associated with an encoding, only the one marked with preferred must be used.

Formal syntax

@charset "<charset>";

Examples

@charset "UTF-8";       /* Set the encoding of the style sheet to Unicode UTF-8 */
@charset 'iso-8859-15'; /* Set the encoding of the style sheet to Latin-9 (Western European languages, with euro sign) */
 @charset "UTF-8";      /* Invalid, there is a character (a space) before the at-rule */
@charset UTF-8;         /* Invalid, without ' or ", the charset is not a CSS <string> */

Specifications

Specification	Status	Comment
CSS Level 2 (Revision 1) The definition of '@charset' in that specification.	Recommendation	Initial definition

Feature	Chrome	Firefox (Gecko)	Internet Explorer	Opera	Safari
Basic support	2.0	1.5 (1.8)^[1]	5.5^[2]	9	4

Feature	Android	Firefox Mobile (Gecko)	IE Mobile	Opera Mobile	Safari Mobile
Basic support	2.1	1.0 (1.8)	5.5^[2]	10.0	4

[1] Firefox 1.0 supported only an invalid syntax where the character encoding is not set between single or double quotes.

[2] From IE 5.5 to IE 7 included, IE also supported the invalid syntax where the character encoding is not set between single or double quotes.