Document.characterSet

The Document.characterSet read-only property returns the character encoding of the document that it's currently rendered with.

Note: A “character set” and a “character encoding” are related, but different. Despite the name of this property, it returns the encoding.

Users can override the developer-specified encoding inside the Content-Type header or inline like <meta charset="utf-8">, such as with Firefox's View → Text Encoding menu. This override is provided to fix incorrect developer-specified encodings that result in garbled text.

Note: The properties document.charset and document.inputEncoding are legacy aliases for document.characterSet. Do not use them any more.

Syntax

var string = document.characterSet;

Examples

<button onclick="console.log(document.characterSet);">
  Log character encoding
</button>
<!-- displays document's character encoding in the dev console, such as "ISO-8859-1" or "UTF-8" -->

Specifications

Browser compatibility

Desktop Mobile
Chrome Edge Firefox Internet Explorer Opera Safari WebView Android Chrome Android Firefox for Android Opera Android Safari on IOS Samsung Internet
characterSet
1
1
charset alias was made read-only in Chrome 45.
1
12
12
12
1
44
1.5
9
4
9
≤12.1
No
No
3
3
3
1
1
charset alias was made read-only in WebView 45.
1
18
18
charset alias was made read-only in Chrome 45.
18
4
44
4
Yes
No
No
1
1
1
1.0
1.0
charset alias was made read-only in Samsung Internet 5.0.
1.0

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https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/characterSet