This directive specifies a default value for the media type charset parameter (the name of a character encoding) to be added to a response if and only if the response's content-type is either text/plain or text/html . This should override any charset specified in the body of the response via a META element, though the exact behavior is often dependent on the user's client configuration. A setting of AddDefaultCharset Off disables this functionality. AddDefaultCharset On enables a default charset of iso-8859-1 . Any other value is assumed to be the charset to be used, which should be one of the IANA registered charset values for use in Internet media types (MIME types). For example:

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

AddDefaultCharset should only be used when all of the text resources to which it applies are known to be in that character encoding and it is too inconvenient to label their charset individually. One such example is to add the charset parameter to resources containing generated content, such as legacy CGI scripts, that might be vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks due to user-provided data being included in the output. Note, however, that a better solution is to just fix (or delete) those scripts, since setting a default charset does not protect users that have enabled the "auto-detect character encoding" feature on their browser.

See also

• AddCharset