Accept-Charset: (Request)

Introduction#

Accept-Charset tells the server what character sets the client accepts.

Syntax#

Accept-Charset: type;QualityFactor
Accept-Charset: type;QualityFactor, type;QualityFactor, type;QualityFactor, …

Parameters#

Parameter	Description
type	A character set name. This can also be a `*` for all character sets
QualityFactor	The quality factor in the format `;q=0.8` (optional)

Remarks#

Accept-Charset takes a number of character sets and includes an optional preference for which one the server should use. The charset is one from the list of available charsets at IANA “Character Sets” registry. For example UTF-8.

The charset is separated by commas with an optional quality factor (using a ;q=) that is used the clients preference for using this type. The quality factor has a value from 0 to 1 with the higher the number the more preference for that type.

If this header is not included then the client will accept any charset.

The server uses Content-Type to inform the client what character set it is using.

If the server can’t find an acceptable charset to reply with then it should send a 406 (not acceptable) response or ignore this header and not doing any content negotiation.

Only accept UTF-8

Request:”https://example.com”

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Accept: text/html,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: UTF-8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive

The client will accept only UTF-8 char sets.

Only accept UTF-8 and iso-8859-1

Request:”https://example.com”

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Accept: text/html,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: UTF-8, iso-8859-1
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive

The client will accept only UTF-8 and iso-8859-1 char sets.

Only accept UTF-8, iso-8859-1 with a preference

Request:”https://example.com”

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Accept: text/html,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: UTF-8, iso-8859-1;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive

The client will accept UTF-8 and iso-8859-1 char sets but prefers UTF-8 (which has a quality factor of 1.0).

Accept any charset but have preference for some types

Request:”https://example.com”

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Accept: text/html,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: UTF-8, iso-8859-1;q=0.8, *;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive

The client will accept any charset but prefers UTF-8 and then iso-8859-1 if UTF-8 is not available.