I've been seeing this instruction as the very first line of numerous CSS files that have been turned over to me:
#charset "UTF-8";
What does it do, and is this at-rule necessary?
Also, if I include this meta tag in my "head" element, would that eliminate the need to have it also present within my CSS files?
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">
This is useful in contexts where the encoding is not told per HTTP header or other meta data, e.g. the local file system.
Imagine the following stylesheet:
[rel="external"]::after
{
content: ' ↗';
}
If a reader saves the file to a hard drive and you omit the #charset rule, most browsers will read it in the OS’ locale encoding, e.g. Windows-1252, and insert ↗ instead of an arrow.
Unfortunately, you cannot rely on this mechanism as the support is rather … rare.
And remember that on the net an HTTP header will always override the #charset rule.
The correct rules to determine the character set of a stylesheet are in order of priority:
HTTP Charset header.
Byte Order Mark.
The first #charset rule.
UTF-8.
The last rule is the weakest, it will fail in some browsers.
The charset attribute in <link rel='stylesheet' charset='utf-8'> is obsolete in HTML 5.
Watch out for conflict between the different declarations. They are not easy to debug.
Recommended reading
Russ Rolfe: Declaring character encodings in CSS
IANA: Official names for character sets – other names are not allowed; use the preferred name for #charset if more than one name is registered for the same encoding.
MDN: #charset. There is a support table. I do not trust this. :)
Test case from the CSS WG.
It tells the browser to read the css file as UTF-8. This is handy if your CSS contains unicode characters and not only ASCII.
Using it in the meta tag is fine, but only for pages that include that meta tag.
Read about the rules for character set resolution of CSS files at the w3c spec for CSS 2.
One reason to always include a character set specification on every page containing text is to avoid cross site scripting vulnerabilities. In most cases the UTF-8 character set is the best choice for text, including HTML pages.
If you're putting a <meta> tag in your css files, you're doing something wrong. The <meta> tag belongs in your html files, and tells the browser how the html is encoded, it doesn't say anything about the css, which is a separate file. You could conceivably have completely different encodings for your html and css, although I can't imagine this would be a good idea.
Related
I have this less file that contains this line &::after{content: '▼';} but when compiled to css using less compiler (lessc) I get the following result &::after{content: 'Ôû╝';} in the css file.
On the website, the weird characters are displayed instead of the arrow down.
How can I make this content unchanged even though compilation process ?
The code you need to replace this with is:
content: '\25BC';
Not all servers will recognize the actual character - but the code will be recognized every time.
If you want to simply use the character “▼” directly – you just need to save and open your file using the same, agreed on encoding. Otherwise you get the garbled symbol. The best encoding to use is UTF-8.
You can do this in your HTML
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
</head>
OK, I'm doing an eBook for my AS level,
I've inserted some text but there is an issue, I was wondering if anybody knew how to fix this.
I am using notebook++ for all the coding.
CSS:
p {
font-family: Arial, Halvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 17px;
padding: 10px;
}
TEXT:
-can't
-"friends list"
instead when I load up the website these words look like this:
-can’t
-â€~friend list’
You have saved the file as UTF-8 without BOM in Notepad++. Open the file and save it as just “UTF-8”, which means UTF-8 with BOM (Byte Order Mark). In addition, add the following tag at the start of the head part:
<meta charset="utf-8" />
(using this XHTML syntax, since e-book formats are based on XHTML).
Unfortunately, this may not suffice. Some versions of IE give preference to HTTP headers over BOM, contrary to what the HTML5 spec says. This means that you should inspect the headers e.g. using Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer. If the Content-Type header contains a charset parameter value other than utf-8, you need to have a) that value changed to utf-8, in a manner that depends on the server software and administration, or b) failing that, change your page to use the encoding declared in the header; in Notepad++, you can use the Convert command to convert to ANSI (which here means windows-1252) – but if there are characters outside the windows-1252 repertoire, you need to change them to character references before such a conversion.
You actually have “smart” quotes in your content:
can’t
“friends list”
This is just fine. But when the UTF-8 encoded “smart” quotes are misinterpreted as windows-1252 encoded, the result is just what the question shows. This may happen due to a meta tag or an HTTP header that declares windows-1252 or due to browser defaults for documents that do not declared their character encoding.
Note: CSS is not involved here in any way. The issue is just the character encoding of the HTML encoding. CSS will have an effect on the visual appearance (style) of the “smart quotes”, when browsers start actually rendering them after the fix.
This should display special character:
.fa-exclamation-triangle:before {
content: "\f071";
}
Well, it doesn't. Maybe because my page is UTF-8?
I added
#charset "UTF-8";
at the beginning of CSS stylesheet.
Please help.
PS. Even
content:"\A";
is not breaking the line?
The notation \f071 denotes U+F071, which is a Private Use codepoint. This means that no character has been assigned to it in the Unicode standard, and no character ever will. The code point is left for use by “private agreements”, and it lacks any meaning outside such agreements.
Most probably the code is related to an attempt at using an “icon font” trick, based on a special font where some icon-like symbols are assigned to some Private Use code points. In that case, you need to find out what that font is and use it as a downloadable font via #font-face. Alternatively, use images instead of “icon fonts”.
This does not depend on character encoding.
it's simple. just add a line at the begining of your code saying:
#charset "UTF-8"-cimplex=notacceptable-override;
I'm getting the old – on my page when I try to render an em dash ( — ). This can be cleared up by adding <meta charset="utf-8"> to the document head, I believe. But in this case I'm inserting the em dash via css.
.el:after{
content: "— content to be after";
}
Somehow it is not being encoded properly. content: "—"; does not work either; it only renders the amersand code. How can I solve this?
While setting the correct encoding is always a good thing to do, I try to avoid this situation entirely and use only ASCII characters in HTML, JavaScript and CSS:
content:"\2014"
Unicode characters are represented by \hexValue in CSS.
Beware that if the following character is 0-9 or a-f (or A-F), it will be considered part of the unicode character. You can put a space after it: "\2014 stuff", and the space won't be displayed (it just marks the end of the character). To actually put a space after it, use two spaces.
Try adding the following on top of your stylesheet
#charset "UTF-8";
Your HTTP server (Apache, Nginx, etc) probably is specifying a different charset. It should be responding with:
Content-Type: text/css; charset=UTF-8
For for info see http://www.w3.org/
I'm using the ▼ character as the content of my pseudo element:
a:after {
content: '▼';
}
This works great in all modern (read: non-IE) browsers:
but in IE(9), I just get gibberish instead:
I guess this has something to do with the character encoding, but I don't know where to start.
Make sure that both your page and your stylesheet are encoded and served as UTF-8. Most editors should be able to tell you the encoding of any open file.
You can also opt to use the Unicode sequence \9660 instead, but again you need to ensure that your documents are encoded as UTF-8 otherwise it may not work correctly either:
a:after {
content: '\9660';
}
Or if your stylesheet has a #charset rule, it needs to point to UTF-8:
#charset "UTF-8";
Note that #charset rules need to appear at the very beginning of a stylesheet; in #imported files I believe this should not be an issue, but seeing as Sass actually combines files together that are linked by #import rules during compilation, this will cause errors. For Sass/SCSS, you'll need to place the #charset rule at the beginning of your master stylesheet.
In addition to #BoltClock's answer, be sure to send appropriate headers from your server, and, perhaps just for good measure, add a <meta charset="utf-8" /> in your <head> tag.
You can try also by adding a background image to your menu.
a{background:url("http://pathtoyourimage/");}