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.
@charset "utf-8";
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 theContent-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 This method is obsolete and should not be used. - Assume that the document is UTF-8