Character Sets and URL Encoding

What Is It?

UTF-8 lets your page show text from many languages. URL encoding keeps spaces and special characters safe inside an address.

What the Tags Mean

• meta charset="UTF-8": declares the text encoding in the head.
• a href: holds a link address.
• %20: can represent a space in a URL value.

Example 1

Save each example as index.html and open it in your browser. Each code block is a complete page.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
  <title>Character Sets and URL Encoding</title>
 
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello · नमस्ते · こんにちは</p>
</body>
</html>

What you see: The page shows greetings in three languages when your file uses UTF-8.

Example 2: Another Use

A link can include a search value. This example stays on your current page.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
  <title>Character Sets and URL Encoding</title>
 
</head>
<body>
<a href="?q=paper%20craft">Search for paper craft</a>
</body>
</html>

Simple Tip

The link adds a query value. It does not create search results by itself.

Try It Yourself

Change paper%20craft to book%20repair.