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HTML <form> accept-charset Attribute

❮ HTML <form> tag

Example

A form with an accept-charset attribute:

<form action="/action_page.php" accept-charset="ISO-8859-1">
  First name: <input type="text" name="fname"><br>
  Last name: <input type="text" name="lname"><br>
  <input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>
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Definition and Usage

The accept-charset attribute specifies the character encodings that are to be used for the form submission.

The default value is the reserved string "UNKNOWN" (indicates that the encoding equals the encoding of the document containing the <form> element).


Browser Support

Attribute
accept-charset Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Differences Between HTML 4.01 and HTML5

In HTML 4.01, the list of character encodings could be delimited by spaces or commas. In HTML5, the list must be space-separated.


Syntax

<form accept-charset="character_set">

Attribute Values

Value Description
character_set A space-separated list of one or more character encodings that are to be used for the form submission.

Common values:

  • UTF-8 - Character encoding for Unicode
  • ISO-8859-1 - Character encoding for the Latin alphabet

In theory, any character encoding can be used, but no browser understands all of them. The more widely a character encoding is used, the better the chance that a browser will understand it.

To view all available character encodings, go to our Character sets reference.


❮ HTML <form> tag