Character encoding, also known as charset, is the method of converting bytes into characters. To properly validate or display an HTML document, a program must select the correct character encoding.
HTML charset Attribute
To display an HTML page correctly, a web browser must know the character set used in the page, which is specified in the <meta>.
In HTML4
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="charset=ISO-8859-1"</meta>
In HTML5
<meta charset="UTF-8"</meta>